The best new crime reads in July
CRIME BOOK OF THE MONTH
Six Minutes by Petronella McGovern
I picked this up because the name ‘Petronella McGovern’ is absolutely far too delightful to avoid, and kept reading because I was hooked. Three-year-old Bella – days shy of her fourth birthday – is at her playgroup, being minded by four mothers while her own ducks out to buy biscuits, when she vanishes. How could she have gone missing when four other mothers were there looking out for her? And where is she now?
While this is, of course, the frantic, terrifying question, more curiosities snake through the book’s pages: why was Bella’s mother, Lexie, so loathe to leave her in the first place? What was the shared history of Lexie and her husband Marty that they were so willing to run to a small Canberran town to avoid? And when everybody connected to them has something to hide, then who can be trusted? The enjoyable answer to that last question is, of course, ‘nobody’.
McGovern’s debut novel is a suspenseful suburban thriller that steals your time and won’t give it back. Tapping into any parent or guardian’s primal fear – that the second you turn away from your child, they’ll disappear – Six Minutes takes that anxiety and pours it into the pages. As days pass and Bella still hasn’t been found, we follow Lexie’s disintegration, Marty’s anguish, and the unhinged actions of too many people around them until your suspicions lie on almost everybody in town. This is a nailbiter that should absolutely not be gifted to any new parents.
NEW CRIME FICTION
The Chain by Adrian McKinty (available 9 July)
The hype for Adrian McKinty’s standalone ‘fiendishly clever’ (Lou Berney) new book is really something else. Brace yourself for ‘a monster hit, including a terrifying premise’ (Mick Herron), inwhich one morning Rachel O’Neill goes to an oncology appointment and then receives a phone call: her daughter has been abducted, and the only way to save her is to pay a $25,000 ransom and then kidnap someone else’s child. Now, they’re part of the Chain. Like ‘ Jaws for parents’ (Don Winslow), ‘this nightmarish story is incredibly propulsive and original’ (Stephen King), and the writing, ‘sharply observant, intelligent and shot through with black humor – should be savored’ (Tana French). Some say ‘I may not read a better thriller in my lifetime’ (Steve Cavanagh) while others say, ‘I can’t believe what went through my mind while reading it – the things I might be willing to do to save my child’ (Attica Locke). In the meantime, ‘I think I’m going to hug my child and never trust anyone again’ (Fiona Hardy).
Knife (Harry Hole, Book 12) by Jo Nesbo (available 16 July)
Harry Hole is in a bad place. Rakel, his wife, has left him. He’s been relegated by his boss to thecases that have already been solved, and just need tying up by someone too talented to fire but too unstable to be given the real cases. And so Harry drinks, goes out, wakes up the next morning unsure where he’s been but sure it’s not been good. He’s determined that a new killer on the loose is not new at all, but is a man Harry helped imprison decades before, who is now free, and who once asked Harry: do you feel safe? To be honest, Harry is full of a lot of feelings at the moment, none of them good and most of them about booze, but it barely matters when it’s a case Harry is allowed nowhere near. And when it feels like nothing can get worse, a tragedy so all-encompassing threatens the very small amount of sanity that Harry is clinging onto. This book is as dark as a Norwegian winter and as sharp as its namesake.
The Last House Guest by Megan Miranda
In Littleport, Maine, the summers are heady and long, full of wealthy holidaymakers and the locals that thrive on the visitors’ deep pockets. Two separate worlds, uniting briefly: except inthe case of Avery Greer and Sadie Loman. Avery is a local with a thorny, lonely past and Sadie the rich vacationer whose family Avery works for, and until Sadie dies on Breaker Beach at the last party of summer, they are the very best of friends. Then, a year after Sadie’s death, everyone returns again to Littleport – and suspicion comes with them. Though Sadie’s death had been deemed a suicide, there are those who believe otherwise, and that Avery, efficient in the business as she is elsewhere, is to blame. In the face of a town closing ranks and the powerful closing in, Avery must do all she can to prove her innocence. A stormy, ocean-deep thriller.
This is Gomorrah by Tom Chatfield (available 9 July)
If domestic murder and kidnapping is far too mellow for your literary needs, look no further thanthe gritty and highly readable This is Gomorrah: internet nightmares madereal, online carnage there for the watching. It’s 2014, and in Syria, a young man with a bad job is using the horrors of war for media glory, while in England another young man with an electricallyoverwrought outdoor shed is using the backdoors of the internet for some well-intentioned trolling. When his connections lead to a real-life interaction – one that ends with the kind of request you can’t say no to – the man known as AZ is thrown into a partnership with Sigma, an online pal and now a human person who’s forcing him to witness some unpleasant facts about the world. When all leads point to the secretive Gomorrah – an internet marketplace only for the planet’s worst people – it’s suddenly time to see if people are as tough in person as they can be behind the anonymity of a screen.
Those People by Louise Candlish
The residents of Lowland Way have long enjoyed their lifestyle: a beautiful, calm street with lovely large houses and a rule that on Sundays all cars are removed so the children can enjoy some blissful outside play. Terribly wonderful, until the owner of number one passes away andsomebody else moves in. Darren Booth does not fit into the Lowland Way lifestyle, nor does he want to: he plays loud music, parks his numerous scrappy cars in other people’s spots, and is completely unwilling to negotiate with everyone’s very practical demands. So when a terrible accident occurs at number one and the police are calling on the neighbours, it’s obvious to all of them that Booth is to blame – except that the police have a few more questions. A thrilling, multi-narrative story where expectations, suburban secrets and neighbouring windows are frequently broken.
Inspection by Josh Malerman
The author of Bird Box – made into a Netflix movie you and millions of other people probably watched – returns with Inspection, where, deep in a forest, an elite school for boys teaches the twenty-six students there all the things they need to know. For instance, that the school’s founder is their father, that they are going to be the cleverest people in the world – and that girls do not exist. But eleven-year-old J is starting to realise that these ‘truths’ are perhaps not reality – just at the same time as K, a student at an elite school for girls who was never told about the existence of boys, realises that she is not so alone in this world. So what happens to your life – and that of those around you – when the world finally comes into focus? A highly original and slow-burning suspense thriller with an ending to brace for.
Shoot Through by J. M. Green
In the third Stella Hardy book, things already seem quite chaotic: her brother is in jail, his girlfriend is pregnant, and Stella’s own boyfriend is acting out of character. But when a visit to Ben in jail is abruptly curtailed by the death of prisoner Joe Phelan, suddenly Stella, a social worker also unfairly competent in other investigative areas, is looking into who killed Joe, whiletelling her best friend (and police detective) Phuong Nguyen that she is doing no such thing. The investigation gets heavy when a dangerous old friend of Joe’s insists Stella find the killer if she wants to avoid a similar fate, and he’s not the only one putting the hard word on her to figure every bloody thing out for everyone. J.M. Green’s clever, witty noir style is about as hard to resist as the characters themselves – and in this, Stella’s final adventure, all bets are off.
Mandatory Murder by Steven Schubert
A wrenching true story about a murder in the Northern Territory, Mandatory Murder reflects on mandatory sentencing laws – and how their power doesn’t always see justice served fairly. Schubert was living in Katherine when the body of Ray Nicefero was discovered outside of town, and when three men were brought in, accused of his murder: Chris Malyschko, the son of Ray’s former partner; Darren ‘Spider’ Halfpenny; and a younger Indigenous man called Zak Grieve. The three were convicted of Nicefero’s murder, despite Zak not being there when it occurred, and yet his sentence – twenty years in jail – was the highest of the three. It’s a chilling case of a botchedmurder, domestic violence, and how the hands of those who have to dispense the sentences are tied despite the facts.
ALSO OUT THIS MONTH
A peaceful Tasmanian town may be more than it seems in Sarah Barrie’s Devil’s Lair (HQ Fiction, PB, $32.99); more queer crime with Tim MacGabhann’s Mexican carteltale, Call Him Mine (W&N, PB, $32.99); a nanny gets more than she bargained for in Kelsey Rae Dimberg’s Girl in the Rearview Mirror (Pan Mac, PB, $29.99); a profiler sees a connection between an old crime and a new one in Katarzyna Bonda’s Polish crime book Girl at Midnight (H&S, PB, $32.99); the K names continue a good crime month with Karen Cleveland’s Keep You Close (Bantam, PB, $32.99) and Karin Slaughter’s The Last Widow (HarperCollins, PB, $32.99); a high school reunion unearths some secrets in Guillaume Musso’s The Reunion (W&N, PB, $29.99); a family keeps the truth from everyone in M.T. Edvardsson’s A Nearly Normal Family (Pan Mac, PB, $29.99); a gangster’s wife runs for her life in Luca D’Andrea’s Sanctuary (MacLehose, PB, $32.99); and your favourite authors return with new books: Heidi Perks’ Come Back For Me (Century, PB, $32.99); Oliver Bottini’s The Dance of Death (MacLehose, PB, $29.99); Robert Crais’ A Dangerous Man (S&S, PB, $29.99); Riley Sager’s Lock Every Door (Ebury, PB, $32.99); Haylen Beck’s Lost You (Harvill Secker, PB, $32.99); A.L. Gaylin’s Never Look Back (Orion, PB, $32.99) … and more!
