Claire McGowan made her bones in the crime genre with a fine series of Northern Ireland-set thrillers that revolved around the forensic psychologist Paula Maguire. Her subsequent standalones – among them Let Me In (2023) and What You Did (2019) – have since established McGowan as an inventively playful novelist who manipulates and reinvigorates the genre’s conventions, and never more so than in her latest novel, The Other Couple (Thomas and Mercer, £8.99).
DS Alison Hegarty, holidaying in Tenerife with her husband Tom, is a detective with “an irrepressible urge to run towards murder and mayhem”. When a body washes up on the beach of their hotel and the Spanish police arrest British tourist Vince, the heavily pregnant Alison makes it her business to befriend Vince’s wife Beth, ostensibly to offer Beth comfort and assistance, but mainly because her detective’s antennae are twitching.
Meanwhile, in alternating chapters, we also get Beth’s perspective on events, albeit Beth’s chapters are playing out two weeks ahead of Alison’s, when Beth has returned to London and is meeting with Corinna and Joel, the social media influencers she and Vince met in Tenerife. Having established the time-lag as a clever way of ramping up dramatic tension, however, McGowan doubles down halfway through the book by reversing the time-lag, so that we now get Alison’s perspective on contemporary events in London, while Beth is back in Tenerife mired in the aftermath of murder and Vince’s arrest.
Smartly structured, and featuring a deliciously cynical and laconic protagonist in DS Hegarty, this blend of police procedural and domestic noir confirms yet again that McGowan is one of the most quietly iconoclastic crime novelists of her generation.
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Three Widows (Bookouture, £9.99) is the 12th in Patricia Gibney’s series of Irish police procedurals to feature Lottie Parker, the Midlands-based DI with “the highest success rate at solving major crimes in the entire country”. Operating in the town of Ragmullin, Parker has her work cut out this time: the local Life After Loss Facebook group that consists of widows and others grieving a variety of losses is being targeted by a serial killer, who tortures the victims and gouges out their eyes before dumping the bodies where they can be easily found.
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All of which sounds rather macabre, but Gibney isn’t particularly interested in blood and gore. Her strength is her understanding, similar to that of Val McDermid, of the tight-knit teamwork that makes the best police procedurals work, even if Lottie’s own team spend as much time bickering with one another as they do tracking down the killer.
And then there’s Parker herself, a no-nonsense cop with a neat line in withering put-downs, and a woman who isn’t even remotely dismayed – is quite happy, in fact – to be described as a “ball-breaker”.
Fast paced, smartly plotted and laced with superb dialogue: if you haven’t read Patricia Gibney yet, Three Widows is a very good place to start.
“What fascinates me most is the art of deception,” says Ormond Basil as The Final Problem (Atlantic Books, £14.99) by Arturo Pérez-Reverte, translated by Frances Riddle, begins, and with good reason: Basil, an ageing actor, is a global icon for his cinematic portrayals of Sherlock Holmes.
Set on the tiny Greek island of Utakos in 1960, where a small travelling party have taken shelter from a storm, the story begins with the discovery of a body and a murder disguised as suicide, whereupon the rest of the company urge Basil to investigate using Holmes’s methods until the Greek police arrive from Corfu.
Aided by his very own Watson, the Spanish detective novelist Francisco Foxá, Basil reluctantly agrees, setting in train a novel that mimics the classic style of Arthur Conan Doyle’s tales but also provides a running commentary on the classic detective story and the devious tricks employed by authors who seek to deceive their readers.
The austere Basil – an inveterate name-dropper who numbers Errol Flynn, Graham Greene and David Niven among his friends – is clearly based on Basil Rathbone, and Pérez-Reverte delivers a finely calibrated homage to the golden age of mystery as he mischievously explores “the powerful force that fiction can exert on the human psyche”.
Sarah Crossan’s Gone for Good (Simon & Schuster, £9.99) opens with the Hoboken teenager Connie Ryder being abducted from her bed in the middle of the night and transported to the Silver Lake Academy deep in the Adirondacks. Designed to rehabilitate troubled teens, Silver Lake is “a behaviour modification program” run like a boot camp; Connie, deeply grieving her dead mother, is at first outraged at her incarceration, and then horrified to learn that one of her predecessors, Belle Jackson, appears to have died in mysterious circumstances that have since been covered up. Determined to secure justice for Belle (“a dead girl shouldn’t be neat”), Connie decides to honour her mother’s memory by investigating the truth about Belle’s death.
Richly decorated as a YA author, Crossan here tells her story in blank verse, a style choice that can occasionally interrupt the narrative flow but also affords her the opportunity to stud the story with nuggets of the darkest noir (“It’s dumb luck that keeps people alive”; “There is no reason / why good should prosper”). Bleak in tone, vividly detailed and impressively ambitious, Gone for Good is a crime novel unlike any other you will read this year.
The concluding book of a London-set trilogy that began with White Riot (2023) and continued with Red Menace (2024), Joe Thomas’s True Blue (MacLehose, £22) revolves around the “spycop” Parker, who has previously infiltrated the National Front against a backdrop of racist murders, and who is now, as True Blue opens in 1988, ordered by his boss Noble to access the underworld of illegal raves and the ecstasy dealers that fuel them.
Meanwhile, the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher – a recurring “character” in the novels, along with her boorish husband Denis – is in no doubt that rave culture is a political phenomenon in that it demonstrates a grassroots contempt for heavy-handed authority, which is the last thing she needs if the despised poll tax is to survive the mass public demonstrations that suggest that the Iron Lady has finally bitten off more than she can chew.
And then there’s the London land-grab and an unexpected drought that precedes the privatisation of the water industry that has Hackney solicitor Jon Davies wryly referencing Chinatown. Blending fiction into historical fact – Thomas frequently allows his characters to quote from documents of the period – the story is told in a terse, telegraphic style that will be familiar to readers of David Peace and James Ellroy, and which shines an unforgiving light on corruption, institutionalised racism and the jaw-dropping cynicism of the political elite. You may not be shocked, exactly, but you will be entertained.
Declan Burke is an author and journalist. His latest novel is The Lammisters (No Alibis Press)
