Crime fiction: Old favourites and a brilliant debut

It’s tempting to believe that the protagonist in Margie Orford’s The Eye of the Beholder (Canongate, £11.99) is named after John Berger; one of her generation’s most important artists, the South African-born Cora Berger’s unorthodox ways of seeing have allowed her to “make a career out of breaking taboos”. Of course, the critics aren’t really thinking of murder when they talk about the taboos that Cora is broaching, but the reader is certainly led to believe, as the novel opens, that Cora has done away with the art dealer Yves Fournier at his remote cabin in Canada. But as Angel Lamar, a volunteer wolf-watcher, starts to investigate the missing Fournier’s whereabouts, we gradually begin to realise that Fournier is a charming sociopath who specialises in preying on vulnerable women, and who exploits his respectable professional status to dabble in some dark arts.

The author of the excellent South African-set Clare Hart series of crime novels, Orford here offers a standalone psychological thriller that ranges from the sun-blasted veldt to the snowy Canadian wastes, employing a heroine who specialises in “making beauty out of what had been broken” to exposé heinous crimes against young women and girls. As Angel’s hard-boiled investigation is blended into Cora’s more abstract interpretation of truth and justice, the result is a hard-hitting, affecting novel about women who refuse to allow men off the hook simply because they are ostensibly refined gentlemen who indulge their perversions at a remove from the victim.

Chris Brookmyre’s latest thriller The Cliff House (Little, Brown, £18.99) opens with a hen party heading to a remote Scottish island to celebrate Jen’s impending nuptials with a weekend at a luxury spa. Brookmyre made his name as a comic crime novelist but there’s nothing funny about this hen party: no sooner has the fractious, argumentative group helicoptered in than their hunky chef is discovered murdered in the hotel kitchen, and matters go from bad to worse when all the women receive a video clip that shows Samira, the sister of Jen’s fiance Zaki, with a noose around her neck. Everyone in the party, apparently, has a secret they want to keep hidden; only when the truth emerges will Samira be set free. Blood will out, as they say, but there’s a lot of bad blood between the various members of the hen party, and Brookmyre has great fun with his Agatha Christie homage. Unfortunately, Brookmyre needs to keep a lot of plates spinning, each of which requires extended flashbacks to explain why Jen has fallen out with Beattie, and Nicolette with Lauren, and so on and so forth, and this stop-start momentum rather undermines the urgency of the women’s plight.

Dorothy Daniels, the narrator of Chelsea Summers’s A Certain Hunger (Faber, £8.99), is possessed of “a dearth of conscience”, which is just as well, because Dorothy is a serial killer who specialises in cannibalism. A fan of “murders kissed with an artistic certainty”, Dorothy tells her story with all the breezy arrogance of a sociopath who relishes her occasional forays into murder just as much as she enjoys her day job as a food writer: “eat what you love” is her motto, which in Dorothy’s case includes a variety of delicacies carved from her lovers’ corpses. All of which is good, dirty fun for the first third of the novel or so, but gradually the reader starts to wonder what the point of telling the story is: Dorothy, we know from the beginning, is narrating her tale from prison, having been convicted of multiple murders. The answer, it seems, is that Dorothy revels in her notoriety, and wants the world to know about her globe-trotting killing spree — it’s an eat, love, prey kind of thing, and it comes as no surprise that Chelsea Summers namechecks Bret Easton Ellis in her acknowledgments. A Certain Hunger is as gleefully brutal and forensically fascinated with gore as was Ellis’s American Psycho and, after a certain point, every bit as monotonous.

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Charlotte Carter’s Coq au Vin (Baskerville, £8.99) will appeal to those crime fiction fans who dig their jazz — there’s a significant crossover, for some reason, that may one day yield a PhD. A New York saxophonist and busker who specialises in jazz, Nanette is concerned when she receives a telegram from her bohemian aunt Vivian, dispatched from Paris and begging for cash. When Nanette arrives in Paris with the readies, however, Vivian is nowhere to be found — has her wayward aunt found her way into trouble yet again? What follows is a delightful yarn about Nanette’s reconnecting with the city she loves, its food and nightlife, its long and storied history of jazz, all of it enhanced by Nanette’s torrid romance with Andre, the young jazz-hound with whom she teams up to track down Vivian. Plot-wise, and despite Nanette’s descent into the seedier quarters of Paris underworld, the crime aspect of the novel is on the skimpy side: it requires a large chunk of exposition near the end to explain all the whats and whys of Vivian’s disappearance, some of which forces Carter to break out of the first-person narrative she otherwise maintains throughout. That said, Coq au Vin is first and foremost a love letter to a jazz-infused Paris, and one that succeeds handsomely on those terms.

It’s still early days, but Conner Habib’s Hawk Mountain (Doubleday Ireland, £11.99) stakes a serious claim for best crime fiction debut of the year. Set in New England, the story opens with high school senior Todd seeing Jack for the first time — a first encounter, unfortunately, that gets them off on the wrong foot. Believing that a nervous Todd is mocking his accent, Jack makes it his mission to destroy Todd. Cut to 15 years later, when we find Todd playing on the beach with his six-year-old son Anthony. A figure looms up out of the sun — it’s Jack, whom Todd hasn’t seen since high school, and who now greets Todd as if they’d been the best of friends back in the day. Unwilling to confront Jack, and second-guessing his own memories, Todd gradually allows Jack to worm his way into his life. That there will be some kind of reckoning is clear from the off, but the manner and timing of that reckoning, along with its consequences, is what will cause even the most jaded crime fiction fan to thrill to the scent of something new. Habib tells his tale in spare, unfussy prose — unsurprisingly, perhaps, given that Todd is an English teacher — but the realistic, matter-of-fact way in which Todd is obliged to negotiate his nightmarish new existence is as disturbing as it is absorbing. Quietly powerful, devoid of gimmickry and grandiose gestures, Hawk Mountain announces the arrival of an impressive new talent on the crime fiction scene.

Declan Burke is an author and journalist. His latest novel is The Lammisters (No Alibis Press)