The dark appeal of domestic noir is largely predicated on the idea, and statistical truth, that a woman is far more likely to be killed by someone she knows than by some random stranger lurking down an alleyway. The title of The Fake Wife (Orion, £16.99) suggests that it will lean into the domestic noir tropes, but when the author is the award-winning Sharon Bolton, it’s best not to leap to any conclusions. The novel opens in the north of England just before Christmas with Olive Anderson, a medical rep on the road, sitting down to dinner in a quiet restaurant, whereupon a woman she’s never met before sits down opposite her and announces to the waiter that she is Olive’s wife. What’s her game? And why doesn’t Olive — recently married to the up-and-coming MP Michael Anderson — just walk away? Meanwhile, Garry Mizon, a firearms officer and self-confessed rubbish police officer (albeit with ambitions to become a “maverick traffic cop”), is making a show of himself during a raid on the home of the notorious criminal Howie Tricks. Naturally, we assume that there is some connection between Olive, the fake wife, Garry and Howie Tricks, and Bolton’s patient, elegant braiding together of disparate narrative strands is one of the main pleasures of The Fake Wife. Most enjoyable, however, are her characters: while a stash of missing gold bullion provides the story’s McGuffin, its true treasure is a cast of characters who seem achingly real as they blunder through a plot that encompasses kidnap, murder, erotica and cold-blooded revenge.
The first of Seraina Kobler’s Rosa Zambrano series to be translated (by Alex Roesch) into English, Deep Dark Blue (Pushkin Vertigo, £14.99) opens on Lake Zurich, where Rosa serves with the Maritime Police. Dr Moritz Jansen, a fertility specialist (whom Rosa has been consulting) is discovered drowned, having apparently fallen from a hired boat after over-indulging in recreational chemicals in some questionable company. But when Rosa discovers that Dr Jansen was on the brink of patenting a breakthrough in gene alteration that would cause his company to be mentioned “in the same breath as the likes of Tesla and Spotify”, the police start to take a closer look at Jansen’s associates. The DNA exploration (and exploitation) provides a fascinating backdrop, and Rosa Zambrano — good company as she takes us on a whistle-stop tour of Zurich’s more interesting nooks and crannies — is herself an intriguing character, and especially as she’s a policewoman who believes that “evidence, forensics and proof” are far less important in an investigation than deciphering “the unfathomable forces” that work upon ordinary people to convert them into killers.
Michael Caine — yes, that Michael Caine — pens his debut thriller with Deadly Game (Hodder & Stoughton, £20), which opens with a suitcase dumped on a Stepney rubbish tip. But this is “not your ordinary East London silly-o’clock fly-tipping”: the suitcase is packed with enriched uranium, and when it goes missing again, DCI Harry Taylor — “from the running, punching and arresting school of detective work” — is given the dubious honour of retrieving it from a range of suspects that includes an ex-KGB oligarch, the sociopathic head of a Mexican cartel, and an international drug kingpin who masquerades as a London-based dealer in modern art. Taylor is a larger-than-life hero, a Jaguar-driving ex-SAS man who dispatches villains as a matter of routine, and while he protests that he’s definitely not Dixon of Dock Green, or The Sweeney’s John Thaw for that matter, he’s certainly the kind of old-fashioned, by-any-means-necessary copper you call when the bad actors get their hands on nuclear weaponry. Caine occasionally lapses into cliche, such as when a frustrated Taylor tosses his badge on to his superior’s desk, but for the most part Deadly Game is an impressively accomplished debut as Taylor and his team jaunt about the planet attempting to thwart a devious plot to terrorize the world with “fun-sized atom bombs”.
The mortuary, according to Dr Terry O’Brien, is where all the real work happens in law enforcement. Recently appointed to the post of temporary state pathologist in Dublin after falling out with her superiors in Glasgow, O’Brien is the creation of Marie Cassidy, the former State pathologist who publishes her debut thriller with Body of Truth (Hachette Ireland, £15.99). Acclaimed by the Irish tabloids for “making murder sexy again”, the glamorous Dr O’Brien experiences a baptism of fire in her new position when the murder of a young woman in the Phoenix Park is swiftly followed by the brutal killing of Rachel Reese, who hosts a popular podcast dedicated to Ireland’s missing and murdered women. Dotted with references to serial killers from Jack the Ripper to David Berkowitz, the novel leans a little too heavily on the trope of the serial killer who has the supernatural ability of always being in the right place at the right time, but those who enjoy their thrillers laced with what O’Brien describes as the “simple” science of forensic pathology will undoubtedly enjoy: “It told you directly, in a trail of evidence that was easily detectable if you knew where to look, the story of what had happened to the dead.”
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Most writers count themselves lucky if they manage to create one iconic character, but then, most writers aren’t Michael Connelly. Resurrection Walk (Orion, £20) finds the Lincoln Lawyer, aka Mickey Haller, working with the semi-retired LAPD detective Harry Bosch, with the latter operating as an investigator for his half-sibling, employing his expertise and cop’s instinct while screening the missives Mickey receives from incarcerated criminals who believe he can work the miracle of having their convictions overturned. Mickey, who has previously experienced the incomparable buzz of the “resurrection walk” — which occurs when an unjustly convicted prisoner walks free — is running a one-man innocence project as a way of giving back, and is tempted to take on the case of Lucinda Sanz, who persuades Harry that she is innocent of the crime of murdering her ex-husband, a cop who is alleged to have been involved in a criminal clique. The twist here, from a legal point of view, is that a convicted criminal is guilty until proven innocent, but once Mickey meets with Lucinda, he’s all in: “She became real, and in the sincerity of her words I sensed the truth. I sensed that she might be that rarest of all creatures: an innocent client.” And so we get an old-fashioned investigation into an ostensibly hopeless case — Harry, along with another of Connelly’s series characters, Renée Ballard, has been working cold cases for years at this point — blended with a courtroom thriller, with Connelly’s deadpan style delivering yet another deceptively understated variation on the theme of justice for all.
- Declan Burke is an author and journalist. His current novel is The Lammisters (No Alibis Press).
