An Empty Death (Orion, £18.99) is the second instalment of the series Laura Wilson began with her previous book, the award-winning Stratton’s War. Time’s moved on to 1944, and Hitler’s doodlebugs are spreading fear and destruction through the war-weary city. But Detective Inspector Ted Strattton’s immediate concern is the murder of a doctor on a bombsite near the Middlesex Hospital in Fitzrovia and the linked activities of a medical impostor. Meanwhile, his wife, Jenny, is mourning the absence of their evacuated children, who no longer seem quite hers; to make matters worse, she’s increasingly anxious that she might be pregnant again, and (in an elegant counterpoint to Stratton’s investigation) she’s dealing with a bomb survivor who wrongly believes her husband is an impostor.
Wilson is very good indeed at creating a precise historical context, whether it’s the Strattons’ suburban home or the medical profession in the early 1940s. She achieves it in the subtlest and most effective ways, building up layers of unobtrusive detail that gradually become utterly convincing. Stratton and his family (including a brother-in-law from hell) are solidly realised characters, as is the sad individual whose sense of failure lies behind at least part of this richly textured and very satisfying murder mystery.
There are Orwellian overtones to Henry Porter’s fifth novel, The Dying Light (Orion, £12.99), a dystopian thriller set in the very near future. David Eyam, the charismatic former chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee, is killed in a terrorist attack in Columbia, apparently quite by chance. But there are those who suspect his death is connected with the reason he was abruptly shunted away from Whitehall. Among them are his former lover Kate Lockhart, a Manhattan lawyer and former SIS officer, whose formidable talents are now honed by grief; and also the enigmatic Peter Kilmartin, whose instructions come from the Prime Minister. Kate has help from an unexpected direction — Eyam himself, who seems to have foreseen his death, and is now manipulating events from the other side of the grave. Meanwhile, on the brink of an election, the government is struggling desperately to contain the spread of toxic red algae in reservoirs.
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