Recent crime fiction | 25 June 2015

The act of reading always involves identification: with the story, the characters, the author’s intentions. Renée Knight takes this concept and pushes it to dangerous extremes in her psychological thriller Disclaimer (Doubleday, £12.99, pp. 304, Spectator Bookshop, £11.69). Catherine Ravenscroft finds a novel in her house which she doesn’t remember buying, and which seems to be telling the story of her own life. Her deepest, most terrible secrets are included. And the final page ends with her own murder. Is this a threat? How can the author have such an intimate knowledge of Catherine’s life, of events and feelings that she’s kept hidden even from her husband?

This is a post-Gone Girl novel: a troubled marriage, and two interlocking stories complete with unreliable narrators. It’s a finely crafted puzzle box. In these days when anybody can write what they like about us on the internet, the book is certainly timely. How far should we go to maintain our privacy? What happens when we confront the person behind the pseudonym? The truth shifts back and forth. Catherine has been written into her own fictional story, portrayed as a victim, but her character is fighting back against the author. Intriguing.

If Disclaimer tells of a localised, one-person conspiracy, David Shafer’s Whiskey Tango Foxtrot (Penguin, £8.99, pp. 432, Spectator Bookshop, £8.49) maps out the global version. Here, a bunch of characters are all at the mercy of an invisible, high-tech network hell-bent on owning all of the world’s information. The source code for this kind of novel is William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition: tangential characters slowly coming together as their lives are transformed by contact with a mysterious device which offers a new way of seeing the world. But Gibson has brilliant ideas; this feels a little scanty in comparison, despite being filled to the brim with hipster fizz and dazzle.