Read the first chapter of our thriller book of the week, Rogue Lawyer by John Grisham, here
Sebastian Rudd, the narrator of John Grisham’s Rogue Lawyer (Hodder £20 / ST Bookshop price £17 / ebook £10.99), represents clients who are “almost always guilty” and whom no one else will represent; they include a brain-damaged teenager, a gangster on death row, a cage fighter, a kidnapper and a man who shot a cop when an armed team crashed into his home. Rudd’s enemies are prosecutors and police who rely on lies to get a result.
Although it consists of discrete cases, Rogue Lawyer falls somewhere between a short-story collection and a novel, with recurring story lines and glimpses of Rudd’s messy private life preventing it becoming overly episodic. It is a hybrid formula that seems to suit Grisham, whose last conventional novel ran out of steam. Here the energy is sustained to the end and, as a bonus, there is a richer variety of characters and milieus than you find when he sticks to a single legal battle.
Taking a break from his Roy Grace detective series, Peter James tries his hand at a ghost story in The House on Cold Hill (Macmillan £20 / ST Bookshop price £17 / ebook £12.98). When Caro, Ollie and their daughter Jade move into a crumbling Georgian mansion in Sussex, a spectral old lady is not slow to appear; and more misery ensues, ranging from poltergeist torments to insulting emails, somehow sent to Ollie’s clients, and untimely deaths. The opening and ending are impeccable, but between them James wearingly crams in so many calamities that you could be forgiven for imagining that his aim is a comic-horror spoof.
DI Rio Wray, the heroine of Dreda Say Mitchell’s Death Trap (Hodder £6.99 / ST Bookshop price £6.64 / ebook £4.49), is in charge of the hunt for armed robbers known as the Greenbelt Gang. When they strike again, leaving three people dead, she also takes responsibility for the safety of a teenager, Nikki, who witnessed one of the murders. Preventing her being abducted or killed proves so difficult, however, that it consumes Wray’s attention and her bosses become concerned that she has lost focus. This meaty mixture of whodunit and witness-protection saga has flaws (crime-fiction clichés are not avoided and verbal errors are rife), but they are outnumbered by its strengths: Mitchell’s zippy, twisty plot, her believable portrayal of Nikki, and a bevy of memorable, supporting goodies and baddies.
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The Reflection by Hugo Wilcken (Melville House £14.99 / ST Bookshop price £13.49), the author of the well-received The Execution, centres on David Manne, a New York shrink in 1949. Asked to commit a Mr Esterhazy (who insists that his name is Smith) to a psychiatric clinic for acting wildly, Manne smells a rat and later smuggles the man out. But then, after a murky incident in a subway station, he wakes up in a clinic himself, heavily medicated and unsure who he is. As his doctor says he is Smith, he plays that blue-collar role from 9 to 5 when he is discharged, while privately becoming a quasi-detective investigating his own past. Is he really Manne, Smith, Esterhazy or AN Other?
“Hitchcock meets Camus” is the unusually apt shoutline for this atmospheric exercise in retro literary noir, and Patricia Highsmith, Vladimir Nabokov, Miles Davis’s cool jazz and Mad Men’s Don Draper could be added to the list of influences or echoes. Like its semi-amnesiac protagonist, it sometimes adopts specific identities (as a murder mystery, say, or a tale of doppelgangers or sinister medical experiments) only to shed them and remain seductively ambiguous.