Latest crime fiction

Wolfgang Herrndorf’s Sand (Pushkin Press, £14.99) is set in 1972 and moves back and forth between a North African city and a small unruly town surrounding an oasis. One man is on the run through the desert regions: he has no name, no memory and no clue as to why he’s being pursued by at least three different parties, all intent on doing him harm. Other characters inter-mingle with this tale of woe: ineffectual detectives, a glamorous sales agent, a commune of hippies, and a paranoid spy whose sense of purpose evaporates in the midday heat. The sun bakes the streets, the sand, people’s faces. And their minds.

The amnesiac really does suffer, painfully at times, running blindly from one problem to the next. Every element of his story is woven together masterfully, with grain upon grain of detail added to a landscape that never stops shifting underfoot. It’s part Pynchon, part Beckett, a crime story told by Lewis Carroll in a particularly nihilistic mood. Sadly, Herrndorf took his own life after being diagnosed with an incurable brain tumour. Sand is a perfect legacy, a unique voice telling a powerful and complicated story that offers no happy endings. Yet the force of life that drives our nameless hero ever onwards offers a modicum of hope. The novel shares this life force, even as the dark closes in.

In 1895 the people of London talk of only one consulting detective, the renowned Sherlock Holmes. Mick Finlay’s debut mystery Arrowood (HQ, £12.99) introduces another detective to the city, one of far lowlier status. William Arrowood lives and works amid the grime, noise and poverty of south London and takes on the cases of the penniless and the downtrodden.