Admirers of crime fiction maestra Patricia Cornwell grew a little weary of her fixation on the identity of Jack the Ripper (she wrote books detailing her contentious theory naming the painter Walter Sickert) and were relieved when she returned to what she does best: creating ornate mysteries for Chief Medical Examiner Kay Scarpetta to tackle. Sharp Force (Little, Brown, £22) might be said to combine her interests, with Scarpetta up against a monstrous serial killer cutting a bloody swathe through the streets of Northern Virginia. Cornwell really stacks the odds against her heroine in this one – not just a wide variety of opponents, but a massive snowstorm arriving from Canada. This is vintage Cornwell, all the better for featuring a fictitious mass murderer rather than one from Victorian London.
Do you think you are familiar with all the tropes of Nordic noir? Well, you may be missing a particularly individual strand if you haven’t encountered the Finnish Antti Tuomainen, who turns the clichés of the genre inside out and turbocharges his narratives with black humour. The latest entry, The Winter Job (Orenda, £16.99, translated by David Hackston), has hapless protagonist Ilmari transferring an antique sofa from the south of Finland when he is joined by an old friend at a gas station. But the duo soon have sinister individuals on their tails, and an innocent task turns lethal. With echoes of such writers as Carl Hiaasen and Christopher Brookmyre, this is delicious stuff, expertly juggling dark humour and quirky characterisation against the backdrop of a frigid northern landscape.
The fallow period in the writing career of legal thriller supremo John Grisham seems very distant these days, his work having regained the precision of such groundbreaking earlier books as The Firm (1991). The Widow (Hodder, £22) has impecunious lawyer Simon Latch up to his neck in debt and the headaches of a crumbling marriage. An elderly widow, Netty, commissioning a new will, presents a lifeline for him, as she appears to be – clandestinely – very well heeled. Netty is keen to disinherit relatives named in an existing will, which leads to violent complications – Simon himself being suspected of murder. Grisham is adroit at dealing with moral ambiguities, and they are all over this novel. He takes his time in the earlier part of the narrative, but when that Grisham grip takes hold, readers will be unable to switch off their bedside lamps.
The edgy British writer Jake Arnott has given us in The Long Firm (1999) a re-working of Akira Kurosawa’s classic Rashomon (1950) set in the London underworld in the 1960s, an impressive social history with thick-ear credentials. Numerous novels later, anticipation has been keen for his new book, Blood Rival (Datura, £9.99), which transplants the Oedipus myth to Arnott’s trademark gangland. In an echo of the real-life Kenneth Noye incident, criminal Lee Royle gives in to road rage on the M25 with fatal results for him. Dealing with the fall-out are Royle’s wife Jo, his enforcer Craig and his wife’s vainglorious lover, Eddie Pierce (all referencing characters from Greek myth). Anyone doubting that Sophocles could be relocated to South London should pick up this blistering and ambitious fusing of the literary novel and the tough crime narrative.
Penguin continues to do impeccable service to the legacy of the great French crime writer Georges Simenon with The Cat (£12.99), expertly translated by Ros Schwartz; the latter’s work eclipses every earlier version of this 1967 classic. Émile and Marguerite are a mature Parisian couple who no longer talk, their mutual antipathy exacerbated by the death of Émile’s much loved cat and Marguerite’s parrot. What results is a terrifying battle of wills. No one is better than Simenon at showing how banal domestic conflict can lead to murderous catastrophe, and this is one of his most authoritative non-Maigret romans durs.
Wild Animal (MacLehose Press, £20) is the latest from a much more controversial writer in French, the Swiss Joël Dicker, translated here by Robert Bononno. Dicker made his name in 2012 with The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair, mopping up literary prizes in France, but suffering some excoriating reviews in other countries. The new book still deals in the author’s trademark narrative twists, with the repercussions of an audacious robbery of a Geneva jewellery shop. More straightforward than the earlier book, this is far more likely to win over the dissenters.
Finally, two solid winners: Abir Mukherjee’s The Burning Grounds (Harvill, £18.99), set in 1920s Calcutta, is another in his masterful Wyndham and Banerjee series, delivered with the usual panache – as is Louise Penny’s The Black Wolf (Hodder, £20) with Chief Inspector Gamache up against a ruthless criminal family. Political chicanery abounds – is Canada about to attack the United States or is it the other way round?
Barry Forshaw is the author of ‘Euro Noir’
