Bodies pile up

A young girl finds the body of her nanny, brutally murdered, and the barely moving form of her mother, a second victim of the attack. The perpetrator of these deeds is the child’s father, who manages to flee the country and has never been seen since. This is the wound at the heart of Flynn Berry’s A Double Life (Weidenfeld, £14.99). Adulthood has given Claire Spenser no respite from her pain. Haunted by the horror she witnessed as a child, she now obsesses over every scrap of information about her father. She investigates his close friends and family, suspecting them of helping him to escape trial. But this isn’t a quest for revenge, more a personal search for justice, and above all, understanding.

Richard Spenser is rich and privileged, and these attributes give him protection. There are obvious hints of the Lucan case, but Berry makes the story her own, weaving in details that snag at the mind’s edge. Claire lives only to settle the problem, and every emotion is filtered through that intent: it makes her a slightly enervated character, one-sided even. But understandably so. The story dances between rage and compassion. This struggle between opposing values propels the book to its startling conclusion.

Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (Fitzcarraldo Editions, £12.99) is an oddity: a crime novel set within a more expansive text that follows the thoughts and actions of Janina, an old lady who lives in an isolated Polish hamlet close to the Czech border. One night she discovers the corpse of a neighbour, a hunter nicknamed Big Foot. The police are satisfied with a verdict of accidental death, but Janina has a more startling idea: that the animals Big Foot was hunting had turned on him and somehow killed him in revenge.