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How Dangerous by Faseem Khan (Zaffrey, £20)
Fired from his role as a backroom servant in British Intelligence, Major Boothroyd, also known as Q, returns to his market town roots in Khan’s brilliant James Bond film. This Q is currently in his 50s; His backstory includes an affair with Miss Moneypenny, and emotional baggage in the form of his history of retiring without his father. What brought him home was the mysterious drowning of his old friend, quantum scientist Peter Napier, for whom he had left a cryptic note; Although the coroner has ruled the death accidental and Q’s old flame, DCI Cathy Burnham, is not considering reopening the case. The stakes here are worthy of Fleming’s canon – Napier’s revolutionary act could have dire consequences – and even if you’re not a Bond fan, you can’t fail to enjoy this unexpectedly funny and strongly drawn mix of nostalgia and new technology.
The Killing Stones by Anne Cleves (Macmillan, £22)
Cleves’s latest bestselling novel is described as The Return of Jimmy Perez, in which Perez and his life partner Dee Willow Reeves, now living in the Orkney Islands with their young son, team up to solve a murder. Christmas approaches when Jimmy’s old friend Archie Stout is found dead at an archaeological dig site, cut up by a Neolithic stone stolen from the local heritage centre. Soon the suspects multiply: the artist with whom Archie may have been having an affair; Educator and local history enthusiast George Reilly; Intermediate archeology professor Tony Johnson and even the wife of the deceased. By evoking a place unlike any other, Cleves keeps the narrative spinning beautifully to create a complex plot that addresses the thorny issue of who controls heritage and the harmful effects of online misogyny.
Bob Mortimer’s Boots (Gallery, £22)
Matt, the unemployed bathroom salesman, the hero of Bob Mortimer’s third novel, is someone who aims low in life and usually gets it wrong. It will be familiar, albeit under a different name and biography, to anyone who has read the first two books, right down to his ventriloquist cat, the role of this symbol of unity having previously been played by, respectively, the squirrel and the dove. Not only has Matt lost his job, but his girlfriend Harriet has left and he is on the verge of becoming homeless. He is offered a luxury apartment without rent, so he seizes the opportunity, but of course there is a problem; Meanwhile, Harriet has problems of her own. Whether you enjoy this or not will depend more on your fondness for Mortimer’s surreal humor than on your liking for crime novels. Matt’s inability to take action at any moment will froth observant readers, but at the heart of the preposterous plot is a poignant story about human relationships.
Benbecula by Graeme MacRae Burnett (Ribbed, £12)
Graeme Macrae Burnet’s latest work is part of the Darkland Tales series examining Scottish history and mythology. The Booker shortlisted author chose a true story from 1857, when laborer Angus Macfie murdered his parents and aunt on their small farm at Benbecula in the Outer Hebrides. He was tried and found to be criminally insane, and spent the rest of his life in the criminally insane section of Perth Prison. Based on available records, Burnett’s version of events was told, some years after they occurred, by Angus’s brother Malcolm, who still lives alone and largely shunned by society in the family home. Remembering the events leading up to the murder, Malcolm slowly loses his grip on sanity as he tries to make sense of something that makes no sense. Burnett’s vivid portrayal of a family troubled by a man trying to explain the inexplicable is dark, intense, and utterly compelling.
Winter Warriors by Olivier Norick, translated by Nick Caistor (Open Borders, £18.99)
Award-winning French writer Norick, known for his series of police novels, turned his hand to a crime on a grand scale: the Soviet invasion of Finland in 1939. It was a “Winter War,” during which temperatures dropped to minus 51 degrees Celsius and the Finns, vastly outnumbered, succeeded in keeping the Russian bear at bay and inflicting much heavier casualties than Their losses were so embarrassing for the Kremlin that the conflict was erased from official Soviet history. Although Norik gives us a bird’s-eye view of the events, the moral and dramatic center of events is the Finnish sniper Simo Haiha, who, like most of the main characters, is drawn from life, and whose skill earns him the nickname “The White Death.” Soviet generals feared Stalin more than they feared the enemy; Dreadfully topical and utterly immersive, with descriptions vivid enough to make you shudder, this astonishing book is not only a testament to courage and resilience, but a powerful indictment of the cruelty and needless suffering that results when ideology collides with reality.
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