On its British showing in 2011, the remarkable Danish series The Killing quickly became something that admirers of crime drama liked nothing better than to proselytise about, while the unconverted were forced into endless apologies as to why they hadn’t committed to its considerable length (the usual excuse? A resistance to subtitles). It was no surprise when the screenwriter, Søren Sveistrup, proved to be just as enthralling a novelist. Daunting length is also a characteristic of Sveistrup’s Hide and Seek (Michael Joseph, £16.99, translated by Ian Giles), but every last comma is justified for the patient reader in this prodigious crime epic. An anonymous nursery rhyme-based text threatens the life of Silje Thomsen, and when she disappears, doughty detectives Naia Thulin and Mark Hess discover disturbing echoes of a case from decades ago involving an ingenious and enigmatic killer. In a frigid Danish winter, there is sense of ever-accelerating threat as the innocence of childhood is inexorably stripped away. The new book is not as flesh-creeping as its much-acclaimed predecessor The Chestnut Man, but its slow-burn grip is even more insidious. If, however, you’re seeking a lean and focused reading experience, look elsewhere.
Jane Harper’s The Dry inaugurated a series in which the parched atmosphere of the Australian outback was conjured with a richly atmospheric sense of place, locating Harper in the upper echelons of Antipodean crime fiction. Her position is consolidated with Last One Out (Pan Macmillan, £22), which is a forensic examination of both familial breakdown and the fracturing of a community. After her son Sam disappeared on the evening of his 21st birthday, Ro Crowley makes her way to the moribund town of Carralon Ridge for the melancholy anniversary of his vanishing. Discovering that his fate is inextricably linked with the death of a community, Ro finds both drought and ‘progress’ are destructive forces, with a nearby coalmine a harbinger of doom.
These are fraught times for journalists as the newspaper industry shrinks. In Dead Heat by Sabine Durrant (Century, £16.99), journalist Matt Grimshaw has lost his job on a paper at which he had considered himself a fixture, and his romantic life is also in trouble. Seeking distraction with his friends Celia and Adam at their villa on Greece’s Mani peninsula, their idyll is disturbed when tech billionaire Reynah arrives – and Matt is dismayed to remember that he is someone he bullied at school. Tragedy ensues. Sabine Durrant is a key talent in the UK crime scene, here allowing us to relish the bad behaviour of her not very likeable protagonist in a plot that pleasingly evokes F. Scott Fitzgerald.
In Portrait of an Unknown Woman (Europa, £14.99), the multi-prize-winning French author Camille de Peretti’s spins an intriguing narrative around Klimt’s stolen 1910 painting ‘Portrait of a Lady’, the subject of which was painted over with another, identical woman, this one wearing a large, wide-brimmed hat. Poetically translated by Hildegarde Searle, de Peretti traces an imaginary history of this enigmatic woman from turn-of-the-century Vienna to 1980s Texas to modern Italy. It’s a remarkable mélange of mystery and art crime malfeasance.
If The Keeper (Viking, £16.99) is not quite vintage Tana French, it’s still written with the narrative élan that is the author’s hallmark. This is the conclusion to French’s Cal Hooper trilogy. The retired Chicago detective (in a fractious relationship with his fiancée Lena) has settled in the remote Irish village of Ardnakelty when the unassuming Rachel Holohan is discovered dead in the river. The investigation into her death is to have seismic results. We’ve been many times to cloistered villages that are hotbeds of betrayals, grudges and power plays, but French burnishes the familiar territory, and Hooper remains one of the most distinctive protagonists in the field, backed up here by an equally commanding dramatis personae.
The sixth outing for the sleuthing duo of Horowitz and Hawthorne, A Deadly Episode (Century. £22), is another winner. The former is the metafictional Anthony Horowitz, who showers the reader with red herrings and puzzles, delivered with his customary wit. It remains counterintuitive that Horowitz does not seem to like the character who bears his name.
Lost Girls (Baskerville, £22) has Charlotte Philby once again eschewing espionage with another outing for the female detective duo Farrow and Chang. With money laundering, missing persons and bags of London lore, Lost Girls is crammed with incident (and a lengthy précis of the earlier Farrow and Chang investigation).
Finally a heads-up for the most recent in the series of unmissable crime reissues by the late American doyen of the genre, Elmore Leonard. Aficionados should not miss the trio of Glitz, The Hunted and Unknown Man No. 89 (Penguin, all £10.99), all couched in the kind of scabrous dialogue for the criminal classes that was Leonard’s speciality.
Barry Forshaw is the author of ‘Simenon’
