The best recent thrillers – review roundup
House of Correction
Nicci French
Simon & Schuster, £14.99, pp528
Tabitha Hardy is in prison for murder, as House of Correction opens. But she’s convinced it won’t be for long: “I still feel like I’m in the middle of a car crash and the crash is going on and on and on. But soon they’ll realise that all of this is crazy and let me go.” The problem is that Tabitha can’t remember the details of what happened on the day Stuart Rees’s corpse was found in the shed outside her house; she suffers from severe depression and “she couldn’t remember that day, or only a few snatches. It had been a day of wild weather and of a crouching fear. The kind of day she had to crawl blindly through, just to get to the end.”
Nicci French husband-and-wife writing team responsible for some of the UK’s best psychological thrillers has created a gem of a protagonist in Tabitha, who sets out to investigate what happened herself, from prison. Sad, small, yet gloriously tough and indomitable, she summons the inhabitants of the place where the murder happened to speak to her and slowly pieces together her case. A version of a locked-room mystery – the killing occurs in a village where the exit road has been blocked by a tree – House of Correction allows the reader to puzzle out what happened alongside Tabitha, while cheering her efforts
Fifty-Fifty
Steve Cavanagh
Orion, £8.99, pp368
Eddie Flynn is a great lawyer but he has a problem – he wants the guilty to be punished and the innocent to go free. Not only does the law not work like that, but the case he’s landed with in Fifty-Fifty is particularly knotty: two sisters, both brought into the police station at midnight. As the sergeant there says: “Their pops was lying upstairs in the bedroom, torn to pieces. The sisters called the cops on each other. They’re both saying the other one killed him.” They are both on trial for murder; Eddie is working for Sofia, and sets to work to prove her innocence. But as he keeps telling us, in deliciously melodramatic tones: “There was something dark at the heart of this case. Something evil. And I had felt its touch. It had hung over this case like the ravens hanging over the city. Watching. Waiting.” Split between the perspectives of Eddie, the lawyer working for Sofia’s sister, Alexandra, and the chilling voice of the unidentified killer, this thriller is bucketloads of creepy fun.
The Lies You Told
Harriet Tyce
Wildfire, £12.99, pp384
In her second novel, Harriet Tyce takes the elements that made her debut, Blood Orange, so compelling and reworks them to tell another gripping tale. Her protagonist, Sadie, is again a criminal barrister and a mother; this time around, however, she’s trying to return to work after a long absence, while also settle her 10-year-old daughter in a new and terrifyingly competitive London school. Sadie left her husband in America for unspecified nefarious reasons and she’s returned reluctantly to the London home of her late mother, a cruel, controlling woman who has ensured the house is full of poisoned memories. Her daughter, Robin, is struggling to get anyone to talk to her at the exclusive Ashams school, while the mothers at the gate are equally unfriendly to Sadie. As she digs into work – she’s defending a teacher accused of grooming a female pupil – she starts to realise their new home might not be as safe as she’d hoped. An insightful look at the realities of motherhood and work, and competitive parenting, this is gratifyingly sinister.
Stone Cold Trouble
Amer Anwar
Dialogue Books, £8.99, pp464
Amer Anwar’s ex-con Zaq Khan and his best friend, Jags, first appeared in Brothers in Blood. They’re back in Stone Cold Trouble; Zaq is still working in a builder’s yard in Southall, after serving five years in prison for manslaughter, and trouble is still finding him with disturbing regularity. Jag’s uncle Lucky has asked the pair to recover a family necklace he mistakenly gambled away, while Zaq’s brother, Tariq, has ended up in hospital after being beaten up by a mysterious gang.
Zaq, sharp, tough and loyal, investigates both – he’s happy to work with the police, but isn’t convinced they’re doing all they can. “He was too shaped by the friendships and rivalries of his youth, watching your own and each other’s backs, no matter what. He’d thought he’d left all that behind, but prison had resurrected and reinforced those old attitudes,” Anwar writes, while Zaq tells one of his housemates, part of the large Asian community that surrounds him, that “this’ll get shelved as just another Asian-on-Asian thing, unless the evidence falls right in their laps”. Darkly funny, packed with action and, for all its violence, brimming with warmth, this is a worthy successor to Anwar’s excellent debut.
• To order House of Correction, Fifty-Fifty, The Lies You Told or Stone Cold Trouble go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15
