The Dark Hours (HarperCollins, £16.99), a debut thriller by Amy Jordan, opens in a remote village on Ireland’s east coast. This sparsely populated setting gives retired Garda Det Insp Julia Harte “the perfect place to disappear”, a retreat from the unwanted notoriety that found her after a criminal psychology textbook she authored became fodder for true-crime podcasters. Her quiet isolation comes under pressure when a news report announces the death of James Cox, long incarcerated for multiple murders, including that of her partner Garda Adrian Clancy, a case that has haunted Harte for 30 years. Harte’s fears of losing her anonymity are quickly realised when she’s called back to Cork to consult on a case that appears to be a copycat of Cox’s crimes.
Reuniting with her old boss, Des Riordan, Harte faces the painful ghosts summoned by this new case. If she’s to prevent more lives from being lost, she must revisit a cluster of tangled and painful memories, from the misogyny she faced as a young guard to the impact her career had on every aspect of her personal life. Well served by its languid pace, The Dark Hours is a promising novel.
Vaseem Khan’s Inspector Persis Wadia – the first woman police detective in India – returns in the entertaining City of Destruction (Hodder & Stoughton, £20). It’s an engaging novel rooted in Wadia’s character, even as it works to encompass a romance plot, a murder mystery, a political thriller and considerable attention to a profoundly complex crisis point in post-Partition Indian and Pakistani history.
In a dramatic opening, Wadia prevents an assassin from shooting the Indian defence minister. The chaos leaves the assassin dead and Wadia’s secret lover, the British police consultant Archie Blackfinch, grievously wounded. MI6 is soon involved and Wadia is taken off the case, assigned instead to investigate a burned corpse. She continues to pursue leads against orders, feeling bound to the case because she fired the shot that killed the assassin, and “convinced that of all those investigating the case, her motives were the only ones shorn of political colouring”.
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Khan smoothly manages the shift from a police procedural to a thriller with “a conspiracy around every corner”, gradually ratcheting up the stakes as Wadia uncovers how her two cases connect. The conclusion resolves some of these threads, but does so in a way that underscores the enduring tensions and contradictions of the political structures involved; as one of Wadia’s better colleagues says, “We work in the shadowlands ... Nothing is black and white”, a perspective that gives this engaging, thoughtful novel much of its appeal.
Nanao, a criminal operative with notoriously bad luck, and a nearly mythic ability somehow to survive that bad luck, returns in Hotel Lucky Seven (Harvill Secker, £18.99), Kotaro Isaka’s sequel to his bestseller Bullet Train. Nanao is sent to an elegant Tokyo hotel by his handler Maria with a simple task: deliver a birthday package to a man on behalf of his daughter. The package’s poorly written address label leads to this “easy job” turning considerably more complicated.
That faulty delivery results in Nanao crossing paths with Kamino, a woman cursed with a perfect memory. She’s in the hotel to get hacker Koko’s help in disappearing from her fearsome employer, crime boss Inui, who may have “a dissection fetish”. Inui’s sent the Six, arrogantly beautiful young blow-dart killers, to hunt for Kamino. Once Kamino’s enlisted Nanao’s reluctant help, they also encounter philosophical friends Blanket and Pillow, crime-scene cleaners with a taste for vigilante justice, and explosives experts Soda and Cola. All of these characters are, in turn, looking over their shoulders for a legendary assassin with a penchant for immobilising victims before killing them.
It’s not easy to get the balance right with comedic thrillers, but Isaka delivers with Hotel Lucky Seven (translated by Brian Bergstrom). It’s more delightful the more it gives itself over to its own nearly delirious excesses, somehow remaining lean and fast all the while. The snappy pacing, intricate plotting, and colourful characters make this a worthy addition to Isaka’s Assassins series.
Kylie Lee Baker’s fantastic Bat Eater (Hodder & Stoughton, £20) opens during the Covid shutdown in April 2020, when “New York is so empty it echoes”. A shockingly violent event on a desolate subway platform separates sisters Delilah and Cora Zeng. Adrift in the aftermath, Cora navigates her own family, the loss of her only close relationship and the very real racism faced by Asian communities at the height of the pandemic.
Already anxious, Cora soon spirals in this death-filled city. This, while undertaking her new job as a crime-scene cleaner, where it soon seems a serial killer may be targeting Asian women, and while trying to placate both her Chinese father’s family and her white mother’s family. Her mother’s sister Lois, for example, helps pay her student loans on the condition that she attend Mass regularly, while Auntie Zeng insists she honour the hungry ghost festival and traditions around the dead, traditions Cora tries to keep at arm’s length for much of the novel.
Baker captures all of this with an unwavering magical realism and a dark humour, particularly in the well-drawn secondary characters of Auntie Zeng and co-workers Yifei and Harvey. In doing so, Baker heightens rather than tempers the horror Cora lives in, one with which she eventually finds peace. The climax is a genuine twist that nonetheless makes perfect sense, distilling the ways 2020′s nightmares continue to haunt us: “Cora thinks about a time, before the pandemic, when she truly thought the worst monsters were the ones inside her own head. When she thought people were mostly good, that they would save each other”.
This astonishing work of speculative crime fiction blends mystery with horror, rage with grief, to memorable and moving effect.
SA Cosby, one of the most dynamic contemporary American crime writers, has edited The Best American Mystery & Suspense 2024 (Mariner, £12.99), working with the series editor Steph Cha. It’s a rich volume, showcasing dynamic tonal and thematic ranges. The best of these stories leverage concision and focus to distil the essential energies of mystery and suspense writing into little poison pills.
There are too many strong stories to list, but some particularly compact examples really strip the form to its bones: Barrett Bowlin’s surprising all-dialogue For I Hungered, and Ye Gave Me; LaToya Watkins’s thorny, affecting Holler, Child; and Shannon Taft’s Monster, which slyly conveys the force of a whole life lived just offstage. Abby Geni’s The Body Farm is a sharp tale of homicide’s temptations and rationalisations, while Rebecca Turkewitz’s Sarah Lane’s School for Girls plumbs the tragedy and pain of adolescent drama, with echoes of Lisa Lutz and Tana French.
Two particular standouts are from Megan Abbott and Jordan Harper. In Scarlet Ribbons, full of evocative ambiguity, Abbott confirms her unmatched ear for the dark mysteries of adolescence and girlhood. Harper, author of last year’s glittering Everybody Knows, turns in My Savage Year, a well-honed marvel of a character piece, elliptical in its way, until it suddenly and memorably reveals its target. Moving, suggestive, and reflective, these writers are some of the best that crime fiction has to offer.
