Many novels deal with unhappy families. But happy families are relatively rare, especially in crime fiction, which is one of the many interesting features of Erin Kelly’s third book, The Burning Air (Hodder & Stoughton, £14.99). The MacBrides have always been close. Rowan has recently retired from the headmastership of a major public school. He is devastated by the death from cancer of his wife, Lydia, the much-loved matriarch; but his children and grandchildren console him. The clan gathers for the annual bonfire weekend at their Devon holiday home. It all goes horribly wrong when baby Edie, the youngest grandchild and apple of everyone’s eye, vanishes one evening, along with the newly acquired girlfriend of Rowan’s only son. Happiness, in this case, comes at a price.
It’s true that the underlying dynamic of the plot sometimes seems contrived, depending as it does on long-term malevolence supercharged to the point of mania. But Kelly has a talent for manipulating her readers’ assumptions that amounts to devilry. Her narrative choreographs a succession of hints, twists and revelations with elegance and precision. The novel is beautifully written and the characters have a dreadful plausibility about them that engulfs you in their untidy lives. Like all the best psychological thrillers, this one leaves the reader feeling mildly traumatised — and hungry for the author’s next book.
With Close to the Bone (HarperCollins, £16.99), Stuart MacBride returns to his police procedural series set in Aberdeen. Logan McRae, now an acting detective inspector but still trying to cope with the unreasonable demands of his foul-mouthed superior, has a typically varied workload: it includes a man who has been strangled, stabbed and necklaced with a burning tyre; the elopement of two teenage lovers; two drug gangs engaged in a civil war; too much paperwork; and a new sergeant who is far too enthusiastic for anyone’s good. Even the forensic anthropologists are engaged in a turf war. There’s also a dash of witchcraft, some maimed Asian immigrants and a film production in progress. The film, based on a bestselling novel, has curious similarities to Aberdeen’s current crime wave. On the personal front, someone is leaving little bundles of what Logan assumes are chicken bones on his doorstep. He is also badly beaten up, though none of his colleagues waste much sympathy on him.
There’s so much going on in this plot that it’s easy to lose one’s way. Not that it really matters — the joy of the series, and of this novel in particular, is MacBride’s combination of grit and wit, his insider’s view of Aberdeen, and of course the interplay between Logan and his friends, enemies and colleagues. In more than one sense, MacBride is the natural heir to the late and much lamented Reginald Hill.
Charles Maddox, Victorian private investigator, first appeared in Lynn Shepherd’s Tom-All-Alone, which contrived to be both an historical crime thriller and a witty re-imagining of Bleak House and The Woman in White. Maddox returns in A Treacherous Likeness (Corsair, £17.99) in another case with its roots in literature. In 1850, Maddox, still recovering from the events in the previous novel, is retained by Shelley’s son, Sir Percy, to investigate Claire Clairmont, who claims to have papers relating to his famous father at her villa in St John’s Wood. Maddox, however, realises there is a deeper, darker reason for this commission — and that his uncle, now slipping into senile dementia, was connected with a mysterious case over 30 years earlier, when his client was the anarchist philosopher William Godwin, the poet’s father-in-law.
This is merely the starting point for a labyrinthine plot that pries into some of the many mysteries and omissions that bedevil the tangled lives of Shelley, his family and his intimate friends. As a piece of literary detective work, it’s stimulating and hugely fun — even brilliant. Purely as a novel, however, it works a little less well than its predecessor: the double narrative sometimes struggles to digest the mass of research.
Robert Wilson’s Capital Punishment (Orion, £14.99) is a first in a series about Charlie Boxer, a London-based private kidnap and recovery specialist. At the heart of the plot is the kidnapping of Alyshia D’Cruz, the daughter of an Indian tycoon, after a drunken night on the town. The tycoon operates on both sides of the law and has many enemies. The green-eyed and awesomely competent Boxer is capable of acting as a one-man private army, which is just as well as this is far more than a simple kidnapping-for-ransom. Meanwhile, he wrestles with his personal problems — his love life is complicated, for example, and his strong-willed teenage daughter hasn’t forgiven him for his poor parenting skills.
Like most of Wilson’s novels, this one occupies the shadowy territory between the crime novel and the intelligent thriller. Though it conforms in many ways to the standard pattern of its genre, it’s dark and powerful stuff. And the ending has a kick like a horse.
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