John Grisham’s Camino Island (Hodder £20) opens with an extended set piece in which the manuscripts of Scott Fitzgerald’s five novels are stolen from Princeton University’s library. Then the scene shifts to Florida, where Bruce Cable runs a thriving bookshop and book-dealing business on the titular island. Mercer Mann, a young novelist with local connections, is hired by insurance investigators to infiltrate his enchanted world of first editions, sex with visiting authors and alfresco lunches. Her task is to learn, by sleeping with him if necessary, whether the manuscripts are in his vault.
Grisham’s first lawyer-free thriller is a bewitching blend of high-stakes spying mission and summer romance, with a fascinatingly ambiguous central character. And with its sun-kissed setting and its charming but flawed hero wooing a younger woman (as in Tender Is the Night and The Last Tycoon), it wittily plays with the idea of “stealing” Fitzgerald’s work — Grisham, too, is teasingly aware that he will be suspected of literary theft.
No Middle Name (Bantam Press £20), Lee Child’s complete short stories, interweaves two kinds of tale: those showing the mature Jack Reacher catching and punishing crooks and traitors as usual; and others filling in gaps in our knowledge of the roving vigilante’s youth. While the former group are dud- free, the latter are fresher and more appealing. Two stand-out stories that unfold in the 1970s are essentially forays into young-adult fiction, and have the fantastical quality of the “boy detective” tradition going back to Tom Sawyer. In one, set on Guam, a teen-prodigy Reacher displays his sleuthing skills; in the other, he manages to secure the arrest of a mafia don and a serial killer on a day trip to New York, while scoring a sexual first between these feats.
Four friends are reunited in the south-coast town where they went to boarding school in Ruth Ware’s The Lying Game (Harvill Secker £12.99). Kate, who still lives there in her rundown family home, has summoned Isa (the narrator), Fatima and Thea because the missing body of her artist father Ambrose has turned up 17 years after his apparent suicide. That the quartet secretly buried him and failed to report his death back then is liable to be exposed, with alarming implications for their futures.
Part mystery (how and why did Ambrose die?) and part psychological thriller (will Isa and the others get away with it?), Ware’s third novel has too slender, uncomplex and familiar a back story at its heart, and aspects of that scenario are unconvincing. But there can be no complaints about the fizzy present-day narrative, with the interplay between the women particularly well handled.
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Its prologue apart, the first half of Dennis Lehane’s Since We Fell (Little, Brown £12.99) is a crime-less literary novel detailing its heroine’s rollercoaster career and marital history. Rachel seems on the verge of national stardom as a television reporter, then she cracks up, becomes agoraphobic, is rescued by a businessman and marries him. As the prologue foreshadows, however, her saviour turns into her deadly enemy, and she gets caught up in a white-knuckle ride involving false identities, car chases, armed standoffs and innocent casualties. “The most thrilling novel I’ve read all year,” Kate Atkinson bizarrely enthuses on the book’s cover, but perhaps she read this peculiar performance in January.
Both halves are typically accomplished, but they are in entirely different genres and, with only Rachel by way of glue, don’t fit together.
Read the first chapter of our thriller of the month, Camino Island, on the Sunday Times website