Recent crime novels | 26 May 2012

William Brodrick’s crime novels have the great (and unusual) merit of being unlike anyone else’s, not least because his series hero, Brother Anselm, is a Gray’s Inn barrister turned Suffolk monk. The plot of The Day of the Lie (Little, Brown, £12.99), Anselm’s fourth case, is triggered by the discovery of files relating to Poland’s suppression of dissidents in Warsaw, mainly in the 1950s. Anselm’s oldest friend, now blind, was caught up in a linked later betrayal while working as a journalist in Poland. He wants Anselm to go there in his stead to examine the file that holds the name of the informant who betrayed both him and many others. The morally barbed relationship between the informer and one of the victims, now an 80-year-old widow, is central to the story.

Brodrick is not interested in cheap thrills. Nor does he make it easy for the reader — his dense, complex narrative moves to and fro in a leisurely manner between England and Poland, and between past and present. His story concerns ‘the tragedy of half-redeemed lives’ and the long consequences of old sins. Anselm’s commission is, he discovers, a question of free choice and, in particular, whether ‘damaged people can make undamaged choices’. That, not the identity of the informer, lies at the heart of this occasionally ponderous but always interesting novel.

Laura Wilson’s DI Stratton series is one of the bright spots of British crime fiction. A Willing Victim (Quercus, £19.99) is set in the middle of the 1950s, with the Suez crisis and the Hungarian uprising occupying the headlines. Stratton, whom we met first in wartime London, is now a 50-year-old widow with grown-up children and an uncertain relationship with his posh mistress, Diana.