In Myles Dungan’s The Red Branch (Etruscan, £11.99), set in 1883, the London Met’s Special Irish Branch sends Sgnt Robert Emmet Orpen to San Francisco to foil IRB dynamite smuggling. Orpen teams up with the local police and tangles with the city’s Irish gangs, all while revelling in his own vocabulary (one corrupt villain “had taken to publicly handing back his backhanders, a palindromic activity frowned upon among the better class of political delinquent”).
Orpen soon crosses paths with the other narrator, Dr Ophelia Williams, who proves considerably more blunt, referring to her guns as “my two good friends, Mr Smith and Mr Wesson”. As the city’s first female police surgeon, Williams threatens local hierarchies and has her own very personal reasons for bringing justice to the same men Orpen’s hunting.
The novel’s plotting is picaresque and almost secondary, right until two operatic deus ex machina monologues reveal all. Displaying a historian’s zeal for period detail – down to Orpen’s eagerly florid 19th-century prose – Dungan filters his extensive research through the abundant noir cynicism that colours this elaborate police procedural.
After a string of powerful standalones, Eli Cranor kicks off a promising new series in Mississippi Blue 42 (Headline, £12.99), with rookie FBI special agent Rae Johnson as the protagonist. The daughter of a legendary college football coach, Rae’s first assignment is a white-collar fraud case in Compson, Mississippi.
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Compson’s economy depends entirely on the University of Central Mississippi Chiefs, the defending national football champions about to make another title run. Just under the surface of the team’s Cinderella story, though, is a swamp of bagmen making banned payments, a virulently corrupt local state senator and a “clueless yet determined” head coach with ministerial ambitions. They’re all prepared to sacrifice the young athletes, but Rae – guided by her belief that her father always played the game “the right way” – has other plans, even if they include going rogue.
A former college quarterback, Cranor’s attuned to the hypocrisies of an industry that burns through the bodies of largely black young men while enriching largely white coaches. About as American as a novel can be, Mississippi Blue 42 confirms Cranor’s gift for grounding stories in the persuasive particulars of place. Here, he leavens his earlier novels’ darkness with a hint of Leonard or Hiaasen’s inept crooks, a lighter touch that illuminates both Rae and a large cast of characters, drawn in rich shades of grey. An American football novel might sound trivial, but Cranor convincingly hangs the plot on a particular rot, one that remains corrosively powerful in American politics.
Yasmin Angoe’s Behind These Four Walls (Thomas & Mercer, £8.99) moves deftly between corporate and familial worlds, creating a thriller that serves as a morality tale about blind ambition, dual lives and conflicted loyalties.
As teens, Isla and Eden left Florida for Los Angeles, looking for fresh starts on the edge of adulthood. Claiming unfinished business with her late mother’s former boss, Victor Corrigan, Eden insisted they stop at his palatial mountain estate in Virginia along the way. Eden never returned from that meeting, though, and a determined Isla went on alone, carrying with her Eden’s mysterious bag of cash, which funds Isla’s new life.
A decade later, Isla’s living in LA, where she’s formed a trio of freelance tech investigators, with her friends Rey (“technology savant”) and Nat (“resident aspiring actress and usual decoy”). When Isla and her colleagues take a job for a PR firm that handles the Corrigan Group, their work leads to a passing encounter with CEO Victor and his entourage. Seeing him up close ignites Isla’s regret at having pressed on alone without knowing what became of Eden: “Victor Corrigan and his crew had entered her world, stoked buried feelings, and reminded her of a debt that she had yet to pay.”
Posing as a journalist interested in profiling the Corrigan family’s celebrated philanthropy, Isla infiltrates the Corrigan home and businesses. As she searches for the truth about Eden’s disappearance, Isla uncovers layers of deception and learns just how many sins greed can cover.
Not yet a year into their splashy new-build home in an old-money suburb – with the requisite dog, two kids, two cars, seemingly stable careers – divorce lawyer Hailey and literature professor Mack are on unsteady terrain from the opening pages of Lauren Schott’s craftily-written domestic thriller Very Slowly All at Once (HarperCollins, £16.99).
Hailey’s gambled by taking a risky case on credit, hoping to net a big pay-day from her client’s billionaire soon-to-be-ex-husband. Mack, for his part in their impending catastrophe, is facing a university investigation: transparently desperate to be adored as “a guru” by his undergrads, he hosted terribly ill-advised student gatherings that featured not a little illicit intoxication. Already over-mortgaged, the couple soon discover they have even less margin for error than they thought.
Their house of cards truly starts to shudder when they get a series of unexplained cheques from a mysterious company, building to a total of $47,000. This dodgy windfall’s followed by demands that Mack and Hailey complete an escalating series of criminal assignments.
Increasingly frantic, they trace the money to “an unregulated Liberian bank”, but who’s sending it? Could Mack’s mob-connected, shady developer father Warner have faked his death and somehow be involved? Could some of Warner’s defrauded clients be out for revenge? Is it Hailey’s client’s angry husband? And why are unnervingly large cracks suddenly spreading through their home’s foundation? As the couple begin to turn on each other, Schott draws the snares satisfyingly tight all the way to a fragile conclusion.
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Set in Washington, DC in the years after Covid, Marisa Kashino’s Best Offer Wins (Transworld, £16.99) deserves all of the praise it’s been getting Stateside. Though it’s her first novel, she’s a veteran writer: a former real estate and home design journalist lauded for her coverage of a cold case murder and of Trump’s real estate machinations, Kashino puts all that experience to work here, with anxiety-inducingly tense and slyly funny results.
A publicist for the hospitality industry, narrator Margo and her husband Ian have been house hunting in DC’s overheated post-lockdown market for the best part of two years. As they keep losing bidding wars – 11 and counting – their cabin fever mounts in the small apartment they expected they’d only need for a few months. Margo’s despairing, until they hear rumours of a real estate unicorn: a house that’s hoping to sell without going on the open market. The house looks like the “set from a movie titled Margo’s Dream House or Margo Dies and Goes to Heaven”, but the intensity of Margo’s desire truly registers when she creeps into the backyard and peers through the windows. From there, things escalate, quickly and continually.
As the situation spirals, Kashino gives Margo – who won’t accept “no” for an answer – just enough backstory to anchor her character without diluting the Highsmith-worthy insanity that begins bleeding in around the edges. Kashino’s increasing complications – the challenging homeowners, the generally unimpressive Ian – enrich the plot as the tension spikes, making this about much more than real estate lust gone bad. It may only be January, but this is likely to remain among the year’s most deliriously entertaining debuts.
