The name is Boothroyd, Major Boothroyd. Or Q, to friends and colleagues, among whom Q counts James Bond, even though Bond is something of “an insufferable egomaniac”. Vaseem Khan’s Quantum of Menace (Zaffre, £20) is a James Bond spin-off commissioned by the Fleming estate, in which Q finds himself forcibly retired and stooging around his childhood home of Wickstone-on-Water with nothing better to do than investigate the strange death of his old schoolfriend Peter Napier.
Napier, aka “the quantum messiah”, was a genius who was pursuing the quantum supremacy and was in the process of building the world’s fastest quantum computer when he drowned in suspicious circumstances. The local police force, headed by Q’s old flame DCI Kathy Burnham, believe that Napier killed himself, but Q believes that certain “bad actors” on the world stage may have had Napier murdered. Guided by Bond’s field-craft (“What would Bond do?”), Q sets about discovering the truth, keenly aware that he lacks virtually every instinct that makes for a successful spy.
What follows is a genteel romp as the previously desk-bound nerd leaps into the fray, with Q deploying self-deprecating humour as he attempts (and largely fails) to emulate his hero, although there are times when his adoration of Bond spirals wildly out of control (“At the end of time, when the stars shook and the heavens fell, Bond would be there, standing at the gates of hell, facing off against the Devil.”). Given to such extravagant flights of fancy, perhaps it’s just as well that Q is no longer responsible for arming those licensed to kill.
Perception is everything, and how an event is framed, and especially the language used to describe it, is crucial to our understanding. That’s the theory of Hazel Greenlee, the protagonist of Hannah Morrissey’s Hello, Transcriber (No Exit Press, £19.99) and a recent arrival in the town of Black Harbour, where she serves as a transcriber of police reports for the Black Harbour Police Department.
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But Hazel has literary ambitions of her own, and when the aspiring author finds herself paying particular attention to the reports filed by Detective Nikolai Kole, who is investigating the death of a nine-year-old boy discovered in a pile of garbage adjacent to the home of a drug dealer (the “Candy Man”) notorious for selling to minors, the seeds of a potential novel are sowed. When Kole gets suspended for a code violation, Hazel volunteers to be his eyes and ears in the BHPD, but soon discovers that the line between conducting research and collaborating in the abuse of power is very fine indeed.
Set against the bleak backdrop of a bone-chilling Wisconsin winter, Hello, Transcriber is a claustrophobic affair. A self-described introvert, Hazel lives in terror of her abusive husband Tommy even as she succumbs to a schoolgirl crush on the enigmatic Detective Kole, who is rumoured to play fast and loose with his roster of mainly female informants. It’s no wonder, then, that her paranoia runs amok on a regular basis and that Hazel spends much of her time second-guessing Kole’s motives and ultimate goal.
But while the heavily overwritten prose certainly lends itself to a realistic characterisation of Hazel as an aspiring author who has yet to encounter an editor, the novel itself gets rather clogged by Hazel’s vivid imagination, which is prone to conjuring up lethal threats from the most innocuous of scenarios.
Sharon Bolton’s The Token (Orion, £22) opens on a boat heading for the Scilly Isles in a brutal storm, with the seven people on board having received a letter informing them they are to inherit a significant portion of the fortune amassed by the reclusive billionaire Logan Quick. Apart from the fact that they’re all in dire need of a cash infusion, there is no obvious connection between the seven, and none of them are able to claim any previous association with Quick; but all have answered the summons to a remote island, where the truth will be revealed.
Much of the novel, however, plays out in the weeks leading up to the characters confronting Quick, where we discover that they all have secrets to hide. It’s a variation on Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, in other words, with just a touch (as one of the characters points out) of Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to sweeten the deal. Sharon Bolton has written some superb psychological thrillers, most recently 2023’s The Fake Wife, but The Token is simply too far-fetched to convince.
Paul Halter’s The Fourth Door (No Exit Press, £9.99) won the Prix du Roman Policier when it was first published in France in 1988. Translated here by Tom Mead, the novel opens in 1948 in a small village outside Oxford, where the Darnley house is notorious as the scene of the brutal death of Mrs Darnley, which was declared a suicide on the basis that it occurred in a locked room.
But Mrs Darnley’s is not the only macabre and inexplicable death in Halter’s debut, which is as full of Gothic flourishes as it is red herrings, all of them faithfully recounted by Stephen, a villager with a healthy cynicism when it comes to murder committed by agents of the supernatural: “My reason would not allow for it. There was something insane as well as uncanny in this bizarre story; something painfully real too … ”
In truth, though, Halter (hailed as the French answer to John Dickson Carr) has very little interest in what’s real, painful or otherwise; his ambition, and one fully achieved, appears to lie in fashioning a worthy homage to the classic “locked-room” murder mystery, one that is as entertaining as it is wildly implausible.
Exit Strategy (Bantam, £16.99) is the 30th Jack Reacher novel and the sixth collaboration between Lee Child and his brother Andrew, a process that began with 2020’s The Sentinel. The novel opens with the nomadic Reacher fetching up in Baltimore, where, in a case of mistaken identity, he finds himself confused with a similarly hulking saviour and dragged into the chaotic world of Nathan Gilmour, who works at Baltimore’s Port Administration.
Gilmour, Reacher learns, has been targeted for blackmail – which involves threats of violence against Gilmour’s nephew – by Morgan Strickland, “the seventh-largest private military contractor in the US”. Currently engaged in illegal importations through the Baltimore port, Strickland has plans to prove the worth of his company’s mercenaries by inciting and then suppressing a small war on the Iran-Armenia border, a travesty that Reacher, as an ex-military man himself, simply can’t allow to happen on his watch.
Reacher, of course, has always been a fantasy character, the one-man army who is a reluctant dispenser of necessary justice, and Exit Strategy hits all the expected beats: the laconic dialogue, the bone-dry humour, the focus on the apparently tiny but vital details, and the regular eruptions of controlled violence. Jack Reacher may be too good to be true, and a little too constrained at this point by his own mythology; even so, this quintessential drifter has a lot of miles left in the tank.
Declan Burke is an author and journalist. His latest novel is The Lammisters (No Alibis Press)
