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📂 **Category**: Books,Crime fiction,Thrillers,Fiction,Culture
💡 **What You’ll Learn**:
The Runner by Scarlett Thomas (Scribner, £16.99)
Part thriller, part romantic suspense, Thomas’s latest novel begins in Cyprus, where 34-year-old Guy is on the run from someone who wants to kill him. Jay (not his real name) is used to evading killers: his assassination attempts began at university, when a Japanese man arrived at his apartment carrying a samurai sword. People have tried to kill him ever since, and the contract for his life has been traded as a commodity in Bitcoin. Now his only obvious ally is the mysterious Ellie, although – given his track record – it’s very likely that she’s trying to get rid of him as well. Before the reader’s sense of intrigue turns into irritating bewilderment, the action returns to Guy’s childhood in Kent, and the reasons slowly become clear in this strange and exciting tale of exorcisms, tyrants, high finance, con artists and marathons along the way.
“The Madman” by Henning Mankell, translated by George Golding and Sarah de Sinarklins (Mountain tiger£25)
Written in the 1970s and first published in English, The Madman is set in a Swedish town in the late 1940s. The country’s wartime paper neutrality continues to divide: pro-Nazis in town want to forget the past, but communist sympathizers, embittered by their arrest, want a reckoning. When a letter to this effect appeared in the local newspaper, the defendants, including the manager of the city sawmill, claimed that the newcomer Bertil Kras was stirring up discontent for political purposes. When the sawmill burns down, Karras is blamed for it too, and the disintegration of the life he tried to live sparks an existential crisis. The older Mankell might have been more concise, but the slow build towards inevitable disaster leads to real emotional depth, and the theme of othering and isolating and punishing people for their opinions remains terribly topical.
Everything You Didn’t Say by Jane Kesey (Hemlock, £16.99)
Casey’s latest indie bestseller is her first book set in her native Ireland. In a remote cabin on the coast of Mayo, a woman wakes up to find her companion gone. The house and her clothes were covered in blood, and she claims she has no idea what happened – but locals swear they only saw one woman, not two. Detectives Ben Butler and Liam Farrell – an attractive couple who deserve a series of their own – are sent from Dublin to investigate. They discover that a lot of things don’t make sense, that the key to the mystery may be in the past, and that there may be more than one person missing. Not only does Casey make wonderful use of the setting of western Ireland, he provides us with a mysterious plot that goes wrong and surprises us at every turn.
The Spy and the Serpent by MJ Robotham (Aria, £18.99)
This second voyage of spy Maggie Flynn takes place in 1968. Now widowed for five years and missing from surveillance while languishing behind a desk in MI5, she is given an unofficial mission: to go to Budapest and fetch the wine dog Fitzroy Carver, a former defector with a passionate longing for the old country and crucial information to trade on a traitor in the middle of the service. Of course, there’s more than meets the eye, and Carver, who insists that his assignment be assigned to a woman, proves strangely uncooperative… We’re definitely on the comfortable end of the spy fantasy spectrum here, with Maggie, who is both an outsider and surprisingly talkative about the true nature of her work, getting more than her fair share of lucky breaks. More could be done with the period setting – James Bond and the Beatles do a lot of the heavy lifting – but the self-deprecating hero is a likable character and his travels across Europe are a lot of fun.
Murder at the End of the World by Akane Araki, Translated by Jesse Kirkwood (Pushkin£14.99)
Japanese author Araki’s thrilling debut begins with the world in chaos as a devastating asteroid hurtles catastrophically toward Earth. In just over two months, it will hit the island of Kyushu, and most Asian residents are focused on getting as far away as possible, while others have chosen to end their lives. Just 60 miles from the expected epicenter, 23-year-old Harrow, in an eerie semblance of normalcy, receives a driving lesson. Her coach, Isagawa, is a former cop whose excessive pursuit of justice got her fired from the force, and when the pair discover a murdered woman in the trunk of the training car, not even the imminent destruction of the planet will stop her from finding the killer. The two embark on a wild journey to find the answers, and the teacher-student relationship blossoms into a delightful friendship between two pairs as they negotiate the chaos in this fun and thought-provoking mystery.
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