Nicci French’s What To Do When Someone Dies (Michael Joseph, £12.99) starts with a chillingly simple premise: Ellie Falkner’s husband dies in a car crash. But there’s another corpse beside him — an attractive woman whom Ellie doesn’t know — and the crash itself is not easy to explain. She grapples with two monstrous possibilities, that her husband was having an affair, and that he was murdered. Friends and family believe her increasingly obsessive behaviour is irrational, a symptom of her grief. Ellie traces the dead woman, Milena, and meets her dysfunctional family. Ellie even assumes a false identity and takes over Milena’s job. Meanwhile her emotions take paranoid shapes, and her own motives arouse suspicion.
The power of this thriller, as so often with Nicci French’s novels, derives from the very ordinariness of its intimate and domestic setting. The plot develops from what is essentially a commonplace catastrophe affecting a pleasant married couple. It is easy for the reader to empathise with the grief of Ellie, the narrator — and, by the same emotional logic, it is equally easy to empathise with her desperate compulsion to find out the truth behind the death. It is a tribute to the quality of the writing that, though the plot strains belief in places, the narrative never loses its dreadful plausiblity.
There is some debate about whether the term Scandinavia properly includes Iceland. In terms of crime fiction it certainly does. My Soul To Take (translated by Bernard Scudder and Anna Yates, Hodder & Stoughton, £11.99) is the second of Yrsa Sigurdardottir’s novels to be published in the UK. Its protagonist, the lawyer Thora Gudmundsdottir, also appeared in the first novel, Last Rituals. One of her clients summons her to look into alleged sightings of a ghostly child at his newly renovated farmhouse, now developed as a New Age resort. Soon afterwards a young woman is found brutally murdered in the grounds, and the client is the prime suspect. Lurking in the background are dark stories of family traumas and wartime Fascists.
In terms of its ingredients, the novel is both spooky and gruesome. But Thora’s distinctly chaotic private life provides both a welcome contrast and moments of very black humour (though perhaps not every reader will enjoy such touches as the SUV with its back seat awash with amniotic fluid). It’s rare to find a crime novel that’s both chilling and witty — an agreeable combination.
Andrew Taylor’s latest novel is Bleeding Heart Square (Penguin).
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