Best new crime: Hanff Korelitz’s 7th novel is wicked, wise and very funny

The first part of Jean Hanff Korelitz's dazzling literary thriller, The Plot (Faber & Faber, £8.99), recounts how once-promising author Jacob Finch Bonner found himself within a forest dark: "the novel-in-progress on his laptop was not a novel, and it was hardly in progress".

After his second book’s lack of impact, Jake is teaching creative writing at Ripley College on “a third-rate MFA programme that nobody – not even its own faculty – took seriously”. A sullen, disrespectful student called Evan Parker has just told him the extraordinary story of his proposed novel, and Jake sees immediately that everyone he knew would read it: “Oprah Winfrey would hold it up to the cameras and you would see it on the table closest to the front door of every bookstore you walked into, likely for years to come.”

Three years later, and no closer to finding his way back to the straightforward path, he Googles Evan Parker and finds that he died not long after their meeting, his novel unwritten. Three years after that, Jake’s novel Crib has slipped to No 2 on the NY Times bestseller list after nine months at No 1, and the first of the messages arrives (from the email address TalentedTom@ gmail.com): You are a thief.

As the Patricia Highsmith references suggest, The Plot is not so much a who as a psychological howdunnit; the identity of the anonymous stalker, although skilfully withheld, is never really in doubt. Hanff deftly interleaves extracts from Crib with “real life” revelations about Parker that the increasingly rattled Jake uncovers, jointly rehearsing the book’s central question: Who gets to write whose story?

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The Plot is wicked and wise (and somewhat gruelling, if you have skin in the game) about the slings and arrows of literary fortune; it is also very funny: “In his experience, poets often read fiction, but fiction writers who said they read poetry with any regularity were liars”; “‘I wish I read more poetry.’ He didn’t, actually, but he wished he wished he read more poetry, which ought to count for something.” (Hanff, whose seventh novel this is, has published a volume of poetry; she is also married to Paul Muldoon.)

If sophisticated, suspenseful entertainment is what you’re after, The Plot delivers in style.

There's a writer who has also lost his way in Paula Hawkins's new novel, A Slow Fire Burning (Doubleday, €14.99). Having achieved huge success with a Captain Corelli's Mandolin-style novel set in second World War Sicily, Theo's son dies, his wife leaves him and he is blocked; finally he returns, under a female pseudonym, with a bestselling thriller featuring multiple points of view and timelines that sounds remarkably like The Girl on the Train, the book that brought Hawkins worldwide fame after a crisis in her own writing life.

“When the muse fell silent, he seized upon a scrap of a story and he made it his own” – except, tragically, as in The Plot, this story belongs to someone else.

Atmospherically set around Regent’s Canal in a series of grandly dilapidated houses and houseboats, with a raffish cast that seem to have wandered out of a 1960s novel by Beryl Bainbridge or Muriel Spark, or a Joseph Losey film, A Slow Fire Burning hits all its murder mystery marks efficiently, if at an angle. But its considerable, unsettling force derives from a turbulently animated, claustrophobic sense of guilt and shame, of children tragically damaged by their neglectful, lotus-eating parents, of the implacable furies of the past ready and waiting to wreak vengeance.

With kinetically realised central characters and an incredibly complex, ingeniously turned plot, this is raw, heady, uncompromising stuff, the best book Hawkins has written.

The best psychological thrillers use twists and turns as a licence to delve deep; Gone Girl was so resonant because it melodramatised the ups and downs of a marriage under strain. In her brilliant fifth novel, 56 Days (Corvus, £12.99), Catherine Ryan Howard takes the tentative getting-to-know-you phase of a relationship and ramps up the tension by siting it within the strictures of the first Covid-19 lockdown.

Ciara and Oliver, who barely know each other, agree she should move into his apartment; we know he is hiding something grave; does her fragility suggest she has her secrets too? What makes this book so affecting is the fiendishly clever way 
Ryan Howard blends thriller tropes with character revelations and the meticulous unfolding of Ciara and Oliver's relationship.

In a crucial scene halfway through, following the couple’s first row, Oliver makes the case for jettisoning the past: “For once, I’d like to start something clean. Without any stories limiting where this can go, who we can be.” Rooted in his own guilty self-interest, this also stands alone as the perpetual lover’s plea: take me as I am!

Meanwhile, Ciara reflects sceptically on her own romantic past: “When things went south, he told her the problem was that she didn’t want a nice guy, but the actual problem was that he wasn’t one.”

Suffused with the eerie surrealism of the first lockdown, 56 Days is staggeringly accomplished at a technical level, but it is its sustained emotional power that raises it to the first rank.

The choices writers made when faced with last year's lockdown are now emerging. With Val McDermid's new novel, 1979 (Little, Brown, £20), the clue is in the title; she has given the uncertain present a wide berth.

McDermid was a newspaper reporter in Glasgow in 1979, just like her protagonist, Allie Burns, and the book 1979 is a hugely enjoyable evocation of a city, an era and a profession still dominated by hard-drinking men and conducted in smoke-filled, obscenity-strewn rooms. Allie is a winning mixture of talent, drive and naivete, and her collaboration and burgeoning friendship with her young colleague, Danny Sullivan, affords McDermid the opportunity to have some fun with the sexual mores of the time.

The fast-paced storytelling flows irresistibly, and McDermid marshals a wide-ranging cast of characters with aplomb: I especially liked stylish Rona Dunsyre, doyenne of the women’s page, who takes Allie under her wing: “I’m a feminist, Allie. And I can spot a sister. Just don’t for fuck’s sake tell anybody.”

1979 is the first entry in a new series; I look forward very much to 1980.

In The Bride Collector (Constable, £14.99), Siobhán MacDonald introduces us to Ellie Gillespie, a taxi driver in the west Kerry tourist town of Kylebeggan. Brides-to-be are being murdered and their bodies posed in their wedding dresses; Ellie has dropped off the latest victim the night before she dies. When local reporter Cormac Scully tries his hand at investigating the case, Ellie turns amateur sleuth and joins him.

The Bride Collector works very well as a portrait of a prosperous Irish town where money talks and everyone has a notion of each other, where the men are weak and duplicitous and the women are disappointed by them. Cormac feels a little generic and predictable, but Ellie, with her troubled, complex background and taciturn manner, makes an intriguing and attractive accidental detective.

MacDonald builds the action to a spectacularly creepy climax, and there is a superbly worked twist to follow that will take your breath away.