The best new crime reads in August
CRIME BOOK OF THE MONTH
Loose Units by Paul F. Verhoeven
Decades after a youthful Paul Verhoeven inadvertently sees a crime scene photo that he’s never been able to shake, he sits down with his ex-cop father John to find out why. Why he couldn’t shake it, how his father coped with so much worse, and how videogame reviewer and pop-culture nerd Paul veered so much away from the paths of action and danger both of his parents barrelled headfirst into. What follows is the story of John Verhoeven’s trajectory from a tired factory worker who sees an ad with a spunky cop in it to police officer with a reputation for getting shit done right – but this doesn’t really summarise Verhoeven’s book. This is not a straightforward memoir; it’s as much about John as a person and the Verhoevens as a family unit as it is about car chases and shenanigans.
The casual, intimate way of writing feels as loose as its title, like a warm chat on the porch looking over the winter mist on the trees beyond – a conversation you’re more than happy to brave the cold to listen to. This same familiarity can make it hard to know what you’d do yourself, in these same situations: faced with colleagues who are needlessly violent, and could direct that at you, what would you do?
Paul’s admiration and pure belief in his father pours out of every page, but it doesn’t stop him probing those moments that you expect in these sorts of stories. From the hard-knock eighties cops, a time of Roger Rogerson and no mobile phones or recording devices tracking what the force is doing, you come away from this book thinking thank god that has changed! There is violence, and damage, and profiling; there are bodies moved to keep paperwork to a minimum; there were times I had to put the book down and look away. (Let’s face it, I’m a crime reviewer and pop-culture nerd, and I couldn’t cut it as a cop either.) It’s grim stuff, but it’s also, often, genuinely laugh-out-loud funny. The story is mostly John’s, with Paul occasionally interjecting with a topical movie reference, or his father’s insistent corrections when he thinks his son might get too fancy with descriptions; these are a riot (but the good kind). John himself is a blast, even though sometimes there are some loose morals to go along with those loose units. It’s a different, personal kind of true crime, with heart – and many other organs besides.
NEW CRIME FICTION
Scrublands by Chris Hammer
A year after the quiet Riverina town of Riversend is rocked to its dusty core by a horrific crime – one in which a priest opened fire on his own parishioners – journalist Martin Scarsden makes his way back there to write the story of the town’s recovery for the newspaper that won awards for its coverage of the tragedy. In the fearsome heat of drought-stricken Australia, and confronted with a town beset with grief, it’s all Martin can do to keep himself together, but Riversend isn’t done with carnage just yet. When two more bodies appear in a dam, and the questions keep coming about the crime his paper had wrapped up with a bow, Martin needs to see through the dust to the truth – before it goes up in flames.
Tunnel Vision by Jimmy Thomson
With ex-sapper scriptwriter Danny and script editor Zan finally free of the Hollywood shenanigans of their first book, Perfect Criminals, the two of them head to Zan’s home country of Vietnam to see about some screenwriting work and get the hell away from LA. But everything’s not as peachy in Saigon as they’d hoped, and it’s not long before they’re caught up in a world of dead bodies, poisonings, disappearances, fuzzy animals out for blood and grown men out for it too. It’s going to take Danny and Zan just about all they have to get underground and get on top of this fresh chaos – and the readers are just along for the ride.
Killing It by Asia Mackay
All right, readers, hold on to your hats, because this one’s a blast. A big, action-packed secret service thriller is always something I’m on board for, but of course, after seventy hundred James Bond movies they can seem a little stale. In Killing It, crack MI8 agent Alexis Tyler is welcomed to her first day back on the team that has missed her after six months of maternity leave, and while now she’s worrying about her daughter (whose carer has been under months of surveillance, of course) and leaking formula powder getting in her gun (at least, Lex thinks, it mostly looks like cocaine), she’s thrilled to be back at the top of her game. What follows is a wild ride of parenting jokes, advice for disposing of interrogated villains, grand theft auto, attempted hacks of basically everyone, motorbike chases, and accusations that her head’s not in the game – accusations that this hardass new mother will not take lying down. (Since new parents never get any sleep.) This is a witty, fast-paced spy thriller with enough twists and kicks to the head to keep any winter blues away.
Resin by Ane Riel (available 9 August)
On a Swedish island called The Head, a family lives all alone, surrounded by the trees that they craft into furniture for a living. There is a mother and a father, and their two children, and there was also a grandmother, but she died when the father killed her on Christmas morning. It was for the best, though, everyone agrees. And in a house full right to the roof with things – stolen things, borrowed things, made things – nothing is quite normal, including the past that led them to now, when Liv, the daughter, is finally talking about her childhood. About the trees, and the game they played with everyone on the mainland where they got to take things left out for them, but you couldn’t talk about it. And about how resin can heal things. And protect them. And never let them go.
Now You See Her by Heidi Perks (available 20 August)
To continue this year’s theme of missing children (sob), this is the story of Harriet and Charlotte, friends, confidantes, mothers – and in for police questioning. Harriet needed someone to look after her four-year-old daughter, Alice, and Charlotte was the natural – if not only – choice in the matter. With four children to look after at the school fête, Charlotte looks away for a moment, and it’s just enough time for Alice to vanish. But who took her? How can a friend let you down so badly? More importantly, how can the secrets these women hold on to lead to something as horrific as the disappearance of a helpless child? A tense British psychological thriller.
Sins As Scarlet by Nicolás Obregón
After the success of Blue Light Yokohama, Obregón returns with Inspector Kosuke Iwata – grinding through his days as a private investigator in L.A., spending his nights not alone, but still lonely. He’s doing everything he can not to think about Tokyo, and about the family he no longer has, until his wife’s sister, Meredith, is found strangled behind Skid Row. Police are dismissive of Meredith’s death, thinking that it was a hate crime, but Iwata needs to find out the truth, and not just for himself. From 1970s Tokyo to present-day California by way of Mexico – with a detour into Iwata’s own past – this is the gritty, brutal underbelly of California’s most sparkling city.
Pieces of Her by Karin Slaughter
The improbably named and empirically popular Karin Slaughter is back with one heck of a story. Laura and her grown daughter Andrea are out at a diner one normal day, having a friendly chat with some people they know, when a man comes into the diner with a ten-gallon hat and a six-shooter and puts five bullets into their two friends. When Laura – mild-mannered, locally loved, grey-haired Laura – stops the killer with stone-cold ease, it ends more than his life. With their family dynamic shattered and police asking hard questions, Andrea, still deep in shock, realises that her mother is not who she thought, and may be in danger – unless it’s everyone else who’s in danger. Another blood-drenched vice-grip of a thriller from Slaughter.
Jar of Hearts by Jennifer Hillier
Georgina Shaw, known as Geo to some and V.P. of Shipp Pharmaceuticals to others, is in the middle of a presentation when the police finally come for her. They have finally found her best friend, Angela Wong, who went missing when they were sixteen years old. They have found her not that far from her home, not whole, and with her comes the knowledge that Geo knew that she was dead, all this time. That it was her boyfriend, Calvin James. That Geo had been there when it happened and sees five years’ jail time for her part in it. But still, the dead bodies pile up, and Geo knows that something is wrong, and that something ties right back to her. A chilling assault of a read.
ALSO OUT THIS MONTH
Much to many readers’ devastation, the final book in Ann Cleeves’ Shetland series, Wild Fire; some historical post-Hamilton crime in Paddy Hirsch’s The Devil’s Half Mile; some juicy spy goodness in Daniel Silva’s eighteenth Gabriel Allon thriller, The Other Woman; Claire Askew’s All the Hidden Truths; J.P. Delaney’s Believe Me; mainstay Peter Robinson’s Careless Love; Jordy Rosenberg’s Confessions of the Fox; Lisa Ballantyne’s Little Liar; James Oswald’s No Time to Cry; Caroline Kepnes’s Providence; Shari Lapena’s An Unwanted Guest … and more!
