Recent crime fiction | 24 April 2014

Louise Welsh rarely repeats herself, a quality to celebrate in a crime novelist. Her latest novel, A Lovely Way to Burn (John Murray, £12.99, Spectator Bookshop, £10.99) is a dystopian thriller set in an all-too-plausible version of contemporary London. Three members of the establishment have shot dead innocent bystanders. The weather is broiling. A plague-like virus known as ‘the sweats’ spreads, bringing panic in its train. Stevie Flint, a cynical TV presenter on a shopping channel, is one of the few survivors. She contracts the disease shortly after stumbling on her boyfriend’s body. The boyfriend, a surgeon who apparently died of natural causes, had concealed a laptop in her loft shortly before his death. He was clearly on the track of something sinister, which is now after Stevie herself.

Once again, the apocalypse is here. Welsh puts her own distinctive mark on it. Billed as the first of a trilogy, this intelligent thriller creates an alarmingly convincing picture of London on the brink of disintegration; it reminds us how fragile we are. The character of Stevie is crucial to the novel’s success — she’s strong but vulnerable; above all, we care what happens to her. Some questions are left unanswered at the end, but we may safely infer that matters can only get worse in the rest of trilogy. I look forward to finding out how.

Belinda Bauer’s fifth novel, The Facts of Life and Death (Bantam, £14.99, Spectator Bookshop, £12.99), reprises one of the themes of her excellent debut, Blacklands: a child’s attempt to heal the wounds of a family. For most of the novel, the viewpoint is that of ten-year-old Ruby Trick, which lends an eerie intensity to the story. It’s set mainly in a hamlet crammed into a dank and claustrophobic combe on the north Devon coast.