In John Connolly’s acutely drawn new novel A River Red with Blood (Hodder & Stoughton, £22), the end of his protagonist Charlie Parker’s story may not quite be in sight, but it’s not as far around the corner as it used to be. Here, Parker and his friends Louis and Angel cross paths again with dangerous forces not quite of this world, forces they’d hoped had been buried. As the friends make their way forward, unsettling hidden memories emerge for all three, memories steeped in supernatural details that will particularly delight Connolly’s long-time readers.
While that series arc unfolds, Parker is also enmeshed in his current investigation, which concerns a teenaged reform school escapee whose death may not be what it seems and the missing girl who may have loved him. There’s anger to spare in this, a novel full of children failed by their parents and by other authorities in a world where “the powerful always start with the most vulnerable and work their way up”.
For all the weight of that righteous anger, A River Red with Blood is also shot through with a fundamental tenderness, offering as much hope as horror, if in Parker’s distinct way. Much of that tenderness comes through his wonderful supporting cast, not least the medium Sabine, who makes a welcome return. That may be a lot for one book, but Connolly excels at moving readers through the world he has woven around Parker, his storytelling at once urgent and patient.
Secrets, lies and manufactured memories swirl throughout Andrea Mara’s Such a Nice Girl (Bantam, £16.99), creating dangerous undercurrents for Siobhán and Grace, whose long friendship suddenly appears to be built on frail scaffolding. When their adult daughters Ré and Luna disappear in the middle of a family wedding, there is distressing evidence of foul play: a lamp tipped over, blood on the carpet.
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Even more troubling, the Guards share their recording of a call they got that night: “A whisper too low and quick to make out who’s speaking. The rapid words just about audible: ‘I need police, help me, my roommate has a knife, we had a fight, she said she’s going to kill me’ ... then the call cuts off.” Siobhán and Grace have always thought Ré and Luna were best friends, but could one really have hurt the other? Did they not know their daughters – or each other – as well as they thought?
As Grace and Siobhán struggle with these new suspicions, decades of assumptions are overturned, voluminous secrets revealed, and veiled motives painfully uncovered. Blended families, secret paternities, exes, frenemies, old grudges and siblings are all called on at various points, contributing just enough soapiness to keep this abundantly plotted, relentlessly twisty suburban thriller rushing along.
A sequel to The Collaborators, Michael Idov’s The Cormorant Hunt (Simon & Schuster, £18.99) brings back lapsed CIA officer Ari Falk while keeping at least one antagonist in play. New to the mix are Asha Tamaskar, a senior CIA officer promoted in the aftermath of Falk’s last case, and Felix Burnham, the faux intellectual leader of a men’s rights movement who is spreading fascism while profiting from convincing “a new set of hurt boys that their pain should be someone else’s”.
The main action follows Falk and Tamaskar as they try to untangle Burnham’s finances, which are suddenly booming, turning what had been his cult-like pyramid scheme into a far more destabilising movement. Idov invests even familiar staples of spy fiction – a mole hunt, a reckless love – with a vital spark that helps the idiosyncratic Falk and Tamaskar stand out from most of their genre peers.
Though the plot has a ripped-from-the-headlines immediacy, Idov lends the story deeper roots by keeping longer histories – of intelligence agencies’ grandiose plots, of eastern Europe’s long memories – constantly in view. Idov’s smart, agile writing moves so quickly it would be easy to underestimate how much is going on. He gives his settings and minor characters (like ambitious third-generation CIA agent Jim Otterbeck) ample grace notes while spreading acidly comic moments throughout this deftly satisfying novel.
Cambridge PhD student Yrsa, the protagonist of Imani Thompson’s memorable horror-infused debut Honey (HarperCollins, £16.99), is outraged at the wrong done to her friend Nina by Nina’s research supervisor Professor Richardson. Yrsa sees no path to justice for Nina, but when the opportunity to give Richardson “a little sting” presents itself – thanks to a bee flying by his glass of lemonade – Yrsa takes it, unaware he’s allergic.
Swatting the bee into his glass, then watching him flail about and ultimately die, she plays “the stupid, silly, distraught woman” when the police arrive. Ultimately, it is more satisfying than any proper sanctions could have been, and Yrsa gets a heady kick from “how easy it is to lie with plausibility”. She’s feeling good: so good that she looks for a way to capture that little high again.
Yrsa is a creative and skilled researcher, qualities that gained her entry into a sociology degree supervised by a leading scholar of Afro-pessimism. She soon repurposes those skills to serve her growing interest in eliminating problematic men. Whatever it takes – wine, ketamine, a baseball bat – Yrsa will find a way to get the job done, shrinking the distance between her personal anger and social vengeance until the feeling “stopped being rage. It was something large like crashing light, like a riot of history. Like relief”.
Thompson writes with wit and precision, intricately tying Yrsa’s research and childhood traumas into her murder spree. The result is a dark, thorny novel with a main character who remains challenging and messily unresolved throughout.
In Ironwood (Orion, £22) Michael Connelly’s Detective Sergeant Stillwell returns. He’s still stationed on the small, tourism-dependent island of Catalina, an hour’s ferry from Los Angeles. Catalina is widely known among LA area police departments as the Island of Misfit toys, with assignment there regarded as punishment for some failure or offence.
Nonetheless, nearly two years into his assignment Stillwell has begun to think of it as home, helped by living with his girlfriend Tash, the island’s harbourmaster. That growing attachment only raises the stakes when a planned night-time bust of drug smugglers at the island’s lonely airstrip goes wrong, leaving Stillwell with a dead deputy, another gravely injured one, and no suspects.
Because Stillwell was involved in the incident, his supervisor takes him off the case. Frustrated by the inaction, Stillwell continues pursuing leads against orders. Along the way he tries to wrap up the trial of a key case from last year’s Nightshade and (like any small-town cop) handling other cases, one of which begins in the station’s lost property room but spreads to a much larger manhunt.
Connelly is known for his Bosch, Ballard and Haller novels, all of which take full advantage of LA’s virtually boundless scale. In contrast, these Stillwell novels set in a geographically isolated enclave on the periphery of LA offer a more measured pace, but without sacrificing LA’s abundant wealth of stories. If not as driven as the Bosch novels, Ironwood is another model of Connelly’s reliable craft.
Elizabeth Mannion and Brian Cliff edited Guilt Rules All: Irish Mystery, Detective, and Crime Fiction (Syracuse University Press, 2020)
