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Cracking reads from Richard Osman and Louise O’Neill

Crime round-up: slick thrills from Lottie Moggach and Louise Penny, Paul Waters’ debut

Pointless egghead Richard Osman has written his first novel. Photograph: David M Benett, Getty

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Declan Hughes
Mon Sep 7 2020 - 06:00

Joyce used to be a nurse, Ron was once advised to calm down by Arthur Scargill, Ibrahim is a retired psychiatrist and Elizabeth, who knows everything, has an officially secret past. They live in a fancy retirement village in Kent, and on Thursdays they meet to solve murders (they reserve the room under Japanese Opera Discussion so they won’t be disturbed), poring over the details of long forgotten cold cases. When a live murder lands on their doorstep, they insinuate themselves into its investigation with charm and sly cunning and the reluctant assistance of PC Donna De Freitas, for whom they engineer an elevation to detective.

The Thursday Murder Club (Penguin Viking, £14.99) is Richard Osman's remarkably accomplished debut, and it is that rare thing, a genuinely funny comic mystery that succeeds completely as a crime novel. With a wry, urbane, intelligent narrative voice pitched somewhere between Kate Atkinson in Jackson Brodie mode and Victoria Wood, Osman directs a diverse cast of characters with flair and a great deal of heart to deliver a page-turning treat.

In Louise O'Neill's stunning new book After the Silence (riverrun, £12.99) a documentary crew has arrived on the west Cork island of Inisrún to investigate the unsolved murder of Nessa Crowley. The student's body was found after a party in Henry and Keelin Kinsella's big house, and it has been assumed ever since that Henry was guilty, and rumoured that Keelin was complicit. Keelin is a native islander, Henry the rich British blow-in, and they have been married for the 10 years since the crime.

After the Silence is an unflinching portrait of a toxic marriage, rich in psychological detail and attentive to, if not always consonant with, the sexual politics of the present moment. “It wasn’t a case of a bad man and a good victim. Keelin’s story was far more complicated than that.” O’Neill’s signal achievement lies in her meticulous, nuanced delineation of how addictive and positively eroticised a coercive relationship can become. Pulsing with a relentless, dreamlike intensity, After the Silence is a compelling read, a beautiful, unsettling Gothic novel.

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Twisty thriller

Nearing the end of a seven-year stretch in HM Prison Brixton, Rob spends his days “working out” at a charity shop. One morning a well-dressed woman trips on the street in front of him. Soon, they are meeting every day, and Rob, spinning fantasies about a future with her, is anxious to conceal his true status as a prisoner on day release. But Steph is not all that she seems, and her meet cute with Rob was far from accidental.

Tightly plotted and uncommonly well written, what elevates Lottie Moggach's Brixton Hill (Corsair, £14.99) above the general run of twisty thrillers is the arresting portrayal of a prisoner's life: "The atmosphere in the wing reminded me of being on a cross-channel ferry: the confinement makes you restless and unsettled as well as sort of sapped and depleted"; "An hour visit is both inadequate and overlong; there's too much and too little to say".

Rob hides in the shop over lunch because he finds the roiling high street too hectic to bear; he will cross the road to pet a dog; women in their infinite variety enthral him with their very existence. Building tensely to a series of heartbreaking revelations, Brixton Hill is an absolute belter.

All the Devils Are Here (Sphere, £19.99) is the 16th outing for Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and to mark it Louise Penny has brought him and Reine-Marie to Paris, where both their children now live. Dinner with Gamache's billionaire godfather, Stephen Horowitz, turns to tragedy when Horowitiz is knocked down in what the detective immediately perceives as an attempted murder. Links are quickly made with GHS Engineering, the company for which Gamache's former second-in-command Jean-Guy Beauvoir now works. When a body is found in Horowitz's apartment, the dynamic duo from Three Pines find themselves caught up in a mystery of Byzantine complexity.

As ever, Penny’s plotting is impeccable, as is her mastery with a setpiece action sequence; the electrifying triple bluff climax of the novel is breathtakingly well done. At its core this is a powerful, emotionally intricate story about family, most affectingly centring on Gamache’s fraught relationship with his son, Daniel, whose resentment at his seeming usurpation by Jean-Guy is never far away. The book takes its title from The Tempest; it is rounded in movingly Shakespearean manner with a birth, a homecoming and a reconciliation.

The central premise of Blackwatertown (unbound, £9.99), the first novel by BBC producer Paul Waters, is certainly ingenious: when an RUC man's gun is discharged by mistake in the back of a police car, his sergeant covers up the error by riddling the vehicle with bullets and claiming they were attacked. The local republicans, thinking a rogue outfit is muscling in, begin to carry out raids. And so breaks out Operation Harvest, the IRA Border campaign of the 1950s.

Waters is a talented writer with a gift for skittish, absurd humour; the village policemen are deftly drawn and the village is vividly rendered, right down the windowboxes in the barracks, “from which geraniums jiggled in the breeze, their petals bright Williamite orange, blood red and the light pink of yapping tongues endlessly gossiping”.

The IRA plot is plausibly constructed and the action skilfully wrought. Less persuasive is the romance with redheaded Aoife, a manic pixie taig girl with secrets so dark they seem quite to overwhelm the novel’s brittle, mordant equilibrium. But there is a great deal to admire in Blackwatertown, and I look forward to reading more from Waters.