Crazy nannies and missing children: the latest crime fiction reviewed

Madeline Stevens’s debut thriller, Devotion (Faber, £12.99), might more appropriately have been titled ‘Desire’. It’s a riff on that old standby: the crazy nanny story. Except, in this case, both the nanny and the mother of the children are equal contestants in the madness stakes.

Ella is poor and adrift in the city. It seems like a golden opportunity when she’s hired to look after the offspring of the rich and very beguiling Lonnie and James. Cue temptation. Ella is soon obsessing over Lonnie, trying on her clothes, rifling through her personal hygiene products. Does she love her employer, or does she want to kill her?

This is a New York state of mind novel, very much in love with its own kinkiness. With a central character both quirky and loathsome, any hopes of identification are quickly dashed. Not that it matters. The book is nicely written, and very dark and sexy in places, like a Leonard Cohen song in a second-hand designer dress. Ella is constantly daring herself to do something provocative, in order to feel alive, or at least not bored. Both Ella and Lonnie are conducting experiments in life and love, but who is the predator, who the prey?

Disappearing Earth (Scribner, £12.99) by Julia Phillips takes the kidnapping of two young children as a starting point, using the incident to explore hope, fear and grief on the remote Siberian peninsula of Kamchatka. Weeks pass, then months, and the children are still not found. The police make no progress. The close-knit community copes with the tragedy as best it can. Each chapter deals with a different set of people — parents, friends, teachers, strangers — looking at how the case of the missing girls affects them, whether directly or at a tangent.