It would be misleading to suggest that The Troubled Man (click here for an interview with the author) is up there with the best of Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander novels (Harvill Secker, £17.99 £15.99). But for anyone who has admired previous appearances by one of the greatest fictional detectives so far, this farewell needs to be read. The plot is adequate but its main purpose is to allow Wallander to meander melancholically through his past, meeting the women he loved and lost, and looking back at his achievements and disappointments.
With Mankell out of the way, publishers and blurb writers are competing to hail the new monarch of Nordic crime fiction.
It’s a futile game, of course, but I would be tempted to offer a name not from the obvious crime soil of Sweden or Norway, but from bleak and moody Iceland. In Ashes to Dust (Hodder, £12.99 £11.69) Yrsa Sigurdardottir’s heroine, the lively lawyer Thora Gudmundsdottir, looks into the discovery of three bodies and a head found in a recent excavation of a house buried in a (real) 1973 volcanic eruption.
The “new John le Carré” is being sought with as much enthusiasm (usually misplaced) as the new Mankell. The problem is that there’s still an old le Carré continuing to write the socks off all contenders and showing few signs of flagging. He’s moved effortlessly on from the Cold War, but the basic elements of most of his novels remain the same. In Our Kind of Traitor (Viking Penguin, £18.99 £17.09) the bad Russian is an oligarch money launderer rather than a spy, but he wants to defect, British intelligence gets involved, and a couple of naive innocents are put in danger.
Without stooping to claim him as the potential successor to le Carré’s long-held crown, I can say that Chris Morgan Jones’s Agent of Deceit (Macmillan, £16.99 £15.29) is the best debut spy adventure I’ve read in a long time. The two main characters — a British investigator with a private intelligence agency and the key manipulator of a corrupt Russian oligarch’s finances — are vigorously portrayed, with satisfying twists and intrigues.
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Deon Meyer is the undisputed king of South African crime fiction, and Thirteen Hours (Hodder, £6.99 £6.25) demonstrates why. Cape Town’s police are frantically attempting to save a holidaying American student before she’s hunted down by local gangsters. Just as impressive as the fast-moving plot is the surrounding backdrop of a South Africa — here represented by its multiracial police — still trying to come to terms with apartheid’s aftermath where equality is in the law, but not always in the hearts and minds of the people.
The monarchical thread having run its course, the only link between the next seven books is that they are all exceptionally readable.
Who would have predicted that Val McDermid, the hard woman of crime and unflinching of gore and evil, could write a delightful tale of murder set in an all-women’s Oxford college? In Trick of the Dark (Sphere, £7.99 £7.59), the forensic psychiatrist Charlie Flint returns to old haunts to inquire into contemporary killings and finds herself drawn into reviewing an unexplained sudden death when she was a student. The soft version of McDermid is just as compelling as the hard.
The Anatomy of Ghosts (Michael Joseph, £18.99 £17.09) is set in a minor Cambridge college in the late 18th century, where the Masters are venal and the students well off and uncontrollable. Madness and deaths occur, a bookseller investigates, and there are touches of the supernatural. No one does sinister historical atmosphere better than Andrew Taylor.
The Last Talk with Lola Faye (Quercus, £20 £18) is a beautifully written and structured novel by the underrated Thomas H. Cook. The second-rate historian Lucas Page has always blamed Lola for his father’s murder, and his own troubled life. Decades later, she turns up at one of his lectures. They talk for hours in the hotel bar. Painful memories are revisited, new facts emerge. What really happened in that small Alabama town so many years ago? Apart from flashbacks, the entire novel is their conversation. Sad and riveting.
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In Jed Rubenfeld’s stunning debut, The Interpretation of Murder, he created the likeable shrink-sleuth Dr Stratham Younger and cleverly inserted him into real events. His second book, The Death Instinct (Headline, £7.99 £7.59) has as its centrepiece a 1920 bombing in Wall Street that caused 38 deaths — a crime that, in real life, was never solved. Younger, sadder and wiser after the world war, in love with a protégé of Marie Curie, aims to succeed where the FBI failed. Again, the mix of fact and fiction works admirably.
The plots of Lee Child’s novels are full of holes, and the über-tough Jack Reacher, the ultimate loner, doesn’t come near to being a believable character. So how come Worth Dying For (Bantam, £18.99 £15.99) is Reacher’s 15th book and hardly any of them have been less than engrossing? It’s a sequel to the terrific 61 Hours (try to read it first) . . . I was about to summarise the plot, but there’s no point. Explaining Child’s grip by ticking off the usual quality criteria doesn’t work. Yet he is one of the great storytellers of the thriller genre.
Stuart Neville’s The Twelve was one of 2009’s best thrillers. Better read it before proceeding to its equally impressive sequel Collusion (Harvill Secker, £12.99 £11.69). The mass killer in The Twelve has fled to the US. The most important survivor hires a hitman, known as The Traveller, to find and kill him. Loads of Irish politics, tribal jealousies, violence and police corruption.
Kate Atkinson has created a crime fiction sub-genre of which she is the only member. There’s a detective, Jackson Brodie, who solves crimes, sort of, but not much else fits the usual formula. In Started Early, Took my Dog (Black Swan, £7.99 £7.59) a fat woman buys a little girl from her feckless mother. Sub-plots deal also with children (lost, betrayed, forgotten, separated from their mothers, dead) and childlessness. Poignant, funny, surreal, sometimes confusing and totally entertaining.
Retro read: The Athenian Murders by José Carlos Somoza
I suspect that this book by the Spanish author José Carlos Somoza didn’t become better known because of its labelling as literary and intellectual. More challenging than usual crime fiction, it discusses ideas more than action, but it’s an absorbing read. The modern-day translator of a Greek work about the unexplained murders 2,500 years ago looks for clues, develops philosophical theories and is sucked into a dangerous crisis of his own. The clever device works.
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Abacus, £8.99 £8.54