Lawyer Eddie Flynn is back in Steve Cavanagh’s Witness 8 (Headline, £16.99). This time out, Flynn’s defending a man charged with murdering a neighbour on his street, filled with wealthy families and those who serve diligently in the background so the privileged lives can run like clockwork. Among those indispensable servants is Ruby, who, “lurking in the dark corners of every home on the street”, has witnessed the murder. A mysterious narrator in her own chapters, she seems to have plans in place, but what are they?
Alongside returning series fixtures such as Judge Harry Ford and laconic investigator Melissa Bloch, Flynn works with a full cast of memorably noirish characters as they attempt to clear his client. Cavanagh leans into the pulpy elements with glee: the official forces, like an ambitious prosecutor and a decorated cop, are hypocrites at best, while the colourful criminals – including assassin Mr Christmas and mafia driver Tony Two F**ks – are often the ones with whom you’d rather share a diner booth. It’s entertaining to see Flynn’s crew again, and this blend of legal drama and psychological suspense makes a welcome addition to the series.
Satisfyingly complex, Anna Pitoniak’s The Helsinki Affair (No Exit, £9.99) moves agilely between late cold war Helsinki and present-day Rome, London and Washington, DC. Protagonist Amanda Cole is the CIA’s deputy station chief in Rome, where she’s on the books as an attache at the US embassy. One July afternoon, as her colleagues are all sleeping off their lunches, she meets a walk-in from the Russian military intelligence services who’s trying to warn her about the impending assassination of US Senator Vogel. Cole’s superior overrules her, dismissing the warning, and the senator dies from what only appears to be a stroke.
That death cracks open a rich story of betrayals and secrets, familial as much as national. Amanda’s father Charlie was a CIA operative in Helsinki, consumed with his Soviet counterparts to the detriment of his marriage and, eventually, his career. Unleashing consequences that Pitoniak manages deftly, difficult truths about that past stalk without warning into Amanda’s present after she discovers her father’s name scrawled on the dead senator’s notes about an ongoing Russian conspiracy.
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Across its suspenseful narrative, The Helsinki Affair suggests how much has remained the same in global politics even while empires seem to have fallen; as one character warns Amanda, the cold war dragged on partly because “certain people were enjoying themselves too much to stop. Not most people ... But a few powerful people, on their side and on ours: They loved the game. They loved having an enemy, having a crusade.”
Edgar Award winner Eli Cranor has produced a powerful third novel in Broiler (Soho, £26.99). Cranor quickly establishes his four central characters and the tensions shaping their lives, immediately defining this tight, propulsive story around those tensions. A lot of crime novels are quick out of the gate with their plots, but fewer are this emotionally affecting, and fewer still as able as Broiler to do both at once.
Gabby Menchaca and Edwin Saucedo are undocumented labourers already worn thin in their mid-20s by their brutally exploitative years in an Arkansas poultry plant, where conditions are severe enough to have caused her miscarriage and a consequent grief that has nearly broken them both. The other two leads are their boss and his wife, Luke and Mimi Jackson.
After Luke summarily fires Edwin, he kidnaps Luke and Mimi’s infant son in a moment of desperate rage, with catastrophic results that Gabby’s the first to sense: “A low humming sound began buzzing in Gabby’s ears ... a noise to mask a truth she already knew: there would be no getting out of this without misery.” Granting all of this a persuasive messiness, Cranor lets his well-developed characters struggle with their rapidly shifting circumstances, so even their bad decisions make emotional sense, borne as they are from fear, anger, pain and confusion.
Cranor depicts these characters with a quiet, deep empathy, rich enough never to deny them their complexity. This is particularly true of Mimi and Gabby, who are this impressive novel’s real centre, from its gripping start to its moving end.
Deborah J Ledford’s Havoc (Thomas & Mercer, £8.99), the second book in her series featuring Pueblo tribal police officer Eva “Lightning Dance” Duran, opens with a bank robbery in Taos, New Mexico. The culprit, a Chicago-based con man, shoots a city cop and escapes capture. In his wake, competing authorities – Pueblo cops, Taos cops and the FBI – each claim some jurisdiction. While those forces tussle with each other, the Pueblo borders prove tragically porous when it comes to trauma and violence: on a school field trip, a young boy from the reservation pulls a gun to scare off a racist bully and is shot by a museum security guard.
The robber and the dead boy are soon linked by their 3D-printed ghost guns, made by Tomás Salas, a local teacher whose intentions to help the Pueblo, like those of so many outsiders, prove destructively delusional. As Duran traces the damage inflicted by Salas’s guns, tribal authorities work to help their people grieve and to protect the reservation from further violence. Drawing together these narrative strands, Ledford brings this impeccably paced, character-driven procedural to a satisfying conclusion.
By anchoring the story in her vivid characters, many haunted by corrosive shame or regret, Ledford elegantly links Duran’s investigations and Pueblo traditions within a compelling narrative that connects Havoc’s cases not only to each other but to earlier generations, giving this novel an uncommon depth.
James Lee Burke’s Clete (Orion, £22) is the first Dave Robicheaux book to be narrated by Robicheaux’s friend, PI Clete Purcel, a steady presence throughout the long-running series. Placing Clete centre stage while keeping Robicheaux close to the action, Burke amplifies the rich backstories that continue to define both characters as they deal with a multitude of racists, drug runners, corrupt cops and human traffickers whose only “common denominator was their mediocrity”.
For all its beauty, Burke’s sleepy Iberia Parish in Southern Louisiana offers “no haven from man’s self-delusion and cruelty”, and both are in abundance throughout the ornate plot, which kicks off when particularly nasty low-lifes (including a wannabe Nazi) attack Clete. While trying to protect other victims of these men, Clete and Dave soon encounter a conspiracy run by wealthy right-wingers, and a mysterious deadly substance that the FBI tries to keep the worst of the villains from unleashing.
The 24th Robicheaux instalment, this is a deeply poetic novel, alive to the tension between a brutal world and any faith in the complexities of the unseen. This tension creates a nearly hallucinogenic quality, dream-like even during Clete’s waking hours thanks to his visions of Joan of Arc. As Clete notes, “Dave is one of the few people who, like me, believe there is more craziness in the world than rationality”. Few writers can develop characters and atmospheric settings so deeply, let alone maintain that depth over changing times. Clete is a testament to Burke’s enduring place on the list of our greatest crime writers.
