Crime fiction for Christmas

Imagine receiving an anonymous suicide note addressed to you by mistake. Would you try to find that person, to help them in some way? This is the opening dilemma in Bernard Minier’s Don’t Turn Out the Lights (Mulholland Books, £14.99), and Christine Steinmeyer’s failure to locate the letter’s sender turns her life in Toulouse upside down. Her dog disappears, she’s accused of harassment at work and her fiancé walks out on her. She believes that someone — some unknown person — is to blame for her misfortunes; but are the threats real, or is Christine losing her mind?

This is a super-accelerated version of a Hitchcock thriller, with thrills and shocks on nearly every page. As the pages zip by, it’s easy to picture Minier writing at speed to keep pace with Christine’s attempts to find out the truth. Set against this we have Detective Martin Servaz, currently suffering from depression. One day he receives a key to a hotel room in which a young woman killed herself. His investigations bring him closer to Christine, and when he arrives at her house we breathe a sigh of relief: maybe now she will be safe, free from her struggles. Well there’s little chance of that, not in Minier’s desperate, dangerous world. He reels out lurid, quick and dirty prose, dirty enough to blacken the fingers as we read.

The Exiled (Orenda, £8.99) is the latest novel from Finland’s Kati Hiekkapelto. Detective Anna Fekete has returned to her hometown in Serbia for a holiday. When her purse is stolen and the thief is later found dead on a river bank Fekete finds herself up against the local police, who don’t seem all that interested, probably because the victim is a gypsy.