The best new crime reads of the month
CRIME BOOK OF THE MONTH
The Nowhere Child by Christian White
One rainy Melbourne evening, photography teacher Kim Leamy is approached in the cafeteria by a man who has news that will knock Kim right out of her orbit: he believes that she is not Kim Leamy, but in fact Sammy Went, who disappeared twenty-eight years earlier from her home in Manson, Kentucky. Two-year-old Sammy’s disappearance caused a rift within not only her own family, but through the town itself, one populated by a religious community that believe that snake-handling is a way to God. As Kim attempts to discover whether the mother and stepfather she adores have been hiding a secret for nearly three decades, the past is relived and the path to Sammy Went’s real story is slowly revealed.
Imagine being presented with the idea that your family is not what you have always believed – it’s inconceivable. Kim’s reaction to this situation follows a believable trajectory of disbelief, gentle investigation, and absolute fear for herself and her family. Her mother is no longer alive to tell Kim the truth – whatever it is – and her half-sister Amy is furious at Kim for even entertaining the idea. When Kim flees to America to dig for the truth, she is confronted with a history that not everyone wants to revisit – one that plays out in alternating chapters that see a small, claustrophobic town full of suspicion and distrust between those that believe in the power of the Church of the Light Within, and those who do not.
The Nowhere Child – winner of the 2017 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Best Unpublished Manuscript – is a taut, rattling thriller that will have you shrieking the next time you see an abandoned piece of rope in the middle of the road.
NEW CRIME FICTION
Retribution by Richard Anderson
For those resolutely suburban readers, like me, the allure of rural crime is relentless: all those long, dark roads, the expansive farmland where anything can hide, and a certain type of character who says more with a long stare than with anything so overt as words. In Retribution, Richard Anderson delivers all of that and more: retribution here is not only a side project but the name of a horse whose disappearance is about to turn a community to violence.
It begins in the lead-up to Christmas, when Graeme Sweetapple, celebrating the holiday season by driving some stolen steers back to his place, encounters a bad car accident on the side of the road and an injured woman who cuts a deal with him: look after the bag she’s got and she won’t tell the police who helped the ute’s occupants get to safety.
Elsewhere, Luke, a protestor at the mines, is leaving the protest life behind and stepping back into his old one; Carson, a woman on the wrong side of men’s advances, is searching for a way out of the town she loves and loathes; Caroline, an ex-politician and Sweetapple’s neighbour, is recovering from the brutal loss of her position in the world. All of them feel the burn of rage and disappointment in their losses, all have someone else to blame, and one stolen horse will see the flames rage. A simmering, gripping tale fraught with emotional tension, populated with rich characters, heavy with the past – and what the future will hold.
Second Sight by Aoife Clifford
Aoife Clifford’s excellent debut novel, All These Perfect Strangers, was university life laid bloody and bare; here, she sets her (second) sights on a beachside community skirting around the national spotlight after a violent coward punch puts their town in the news. Eliza Carmody was there, watching in disbelief as road rage and a familiar face turned to danger, and events further conspire to drag her back to Kinsale, the town she’s always wanted to run from. She hadn’t wanted to be there in the first place – not a place with such bitter history for her – but her job as a lawyer had seen her return, battling the class-action suit directed at the power company blamed for the fires that ravaged the town and its happiness. It’s a job she needs to keep fast and quiet, but the past is not letting her go this time. Clifford’s punchy writing and the slow burn of tension make this an immediate, sparky tale to keep as close as you dare.
You Were Made For This by Michelle Sacks
There’s nothing quite like an imperfect mother to pique the interest of crime readers. Every mother feels like they are just short of being a mother; others judge mothers (and fathers) for every move they make. Merry is, to all appearances, perfect: living off the land in the lush Swedish countryside with her husband, Sam, in an old house gifted to him by a relative. They have escaped the crushing dystopia that is New York and now live in the fresh air. Sam is looking for film work; Merry is baking cakes and tending to the garden and to her beautiful son, Conor. Well, sometimes she tends to her beautiful son. And Sam’s hunt isn’t so successful, but the picture-perfect life he has created is – surely? With Merry’s old friend Frank coming to stay, someone else will see just how splendid it is. Unless, of course, the truth is revealed instead.
Something in the Water by Catherine Steadman
Have you ever tried to dig a grave on your own? It’s not easy – and how you get from a normal life to standing in the dirt is harder still. When Erin and Mark – documentary filmmaker and banker respectively – go on the honeymoon of their dreams, it’s with the heaviness of their newly impoverished lives back home weighing down on them. But for now, it’s the sun-kissed and elsewhere-kissed lifestyle they’ve been looking forward to, and a scuba trip or two. Well, until there’s the thunk of their boat hitting something in the water. And what our two newlyweds do with this knowledge will bring down no end of chaos. Actress and author Catherine Steadman – of Downton Abbey fame – lets off a firework at the start and then builds tension until the breathless ending. Perfect for those escaping winter to the beach – but just stay on the sand, perhaps.
Death Notice by Zhou Haohui (translated by Zac Haluza)
Eighteen years ago, two murders shook Chengdu’s police to their core, sweeping the cases to the side to hide their lack of clues or insight. But all those years, Sergeant Zheng Haoming has been looking into this cold case, and now, things are heating up. The mysterious Eumenides – named for the Greek goddess of vengeance – has reappeared, so to speak, and is open for suggestions: who deserves to die for what they have done? It’s not long before someone is dead and the next one is advertised freely: here is who we are killing, and why, and when. When the execution takes place despite police protection, the frantic chase to stop these brutal murders begins. Blisteringly popular in Zhou’s native China, this is a hell of a thriller.
Lonely Girl by Lynne Vincent McCarthy
In a lonely house by the Tasmanian wilderness, Ana and her dog River prepare for their own end of days. River is old and he is sick, and Ana is young and she has had enough of life already. Just before she can finish it, the town is overrun by police cars and crime-scene tape: a woman is dead, and Ana knows who she is, because Ana saw her right before she died. And she was not alone. Ana’s scarred family history of spite and the scathing world around her means that Ana knows there is only one way to solve a problem like a murderer in her midst, and that is to deal with it the same capable way she’s ever dealt with anything: on your own. This is a slowly devastating psychological thriller.
The Other Wife by Michael Robotham
Michael Robotham is one of those constants on the crime-fiction shelf that you can always rely on, delivering an addictive and readable book a year like an un-birthday present. In The Other Wife, Joe O’Loughlin returns, a little older, a little sadder, reeling from his status as a single father, working out his new place in the world with his grief and his two daughters. Into all this comes his father, hospitalised from a fall on the stairs at the home he lived in with his wife. Except that this wife is not the one Joe has known his whole life as his mother, but another woman – another wife. With the security of his parents’ relationship in shreds, it’s all he can do to think straight, and realise that something isn’t right about his father’s fall after all. A stellar thriller.
ALSO OUT THIS MONTH…
Also out this month: ex-magician John Ajvide Lindqvist writes about a magician named John Lindqvist whose apartment basement is hiding something unexpected in I Always Find You; another Swedish family-gone-wrong in Zoje Stage’s Baby Teeth; Ruth Ware’s The Death of Mrs Westaway; Linwood Barclay’s A Noise Downstairs; Alex Dahl’s The Boy at the Door; James Brabazon’s The Break Line; Peter Cotton’s Dead Heat; Henry Porter’s Firefly; Final Girls author Riley Sager back with Last Time I Lied; Adrian d’Hagé’s The Russian Affair; Sophie Hénaff’s Stick Together; Jo Jakeman’s Sticks and Stones; Michael Rutger’s The Anomaly; Laura Marshall’s Three Little Lies; Marc Elsberg’s Zero … and more!
