Sabine Durrant’s Lie With Me (Mulholland, £14.99) is enormous fun, a psychological thriller worthy of Ruth Rendell or Patricia Highsmith. We know that Paul – a once-successful novelist, now a professional freeloader – is awful, but he is roguishly charming company and has a gift for noticing telling details, even if the pattern he makes with them is fatally askew. His whole identity is based on lies which, so far, have never caught up with him. But when by chance he meets an old university friend and gets in with his circle, including a widow called Alice, Paul is invited to spend the summer with their families at her Greek villa. Is he the lucky recipient of their generosity or an object of contempt, lured to Greece for some other nefarious purpose? The way the narration keeps us guessing is masterly. But Durrant is an astute satirist, too. She captures this monied but dysfunctional world with hilarious precision, down to little details such as the way upper-middle-class people say “oh, well done” to those beneath them for middling achievements such as completing a journey.
To complain about thrillers being “implausible” always feels slightly dumb. But the truth is their universe must have integrity and coherence – especially if an author’s goal is the undermining of those qualities for effect. The heroine of Helen Callaghan’s warm, engaging but ultimately puzzling debut Dear Amy (Michael Joseph, £12.99) is Margot Lewis, a secondary school teacher who moonlights as an agony aunt for her local newspaper in Cambridge. This is a world in which people write physical letters to “Dear Amy” which, even more surprisingly, Margot goes into the paper’s office to collect. One day, shortly after a girl from her school is abducted, she receives the first of several letters purporting to be from Bethan Avery, another local girl who vanished 20 years before. She takes the second of these to the police, but they are not interested. At one point she visits her local library because she hasn’t been able to find the information she needs on the internet. After you have clocked up several of these “What, really?” moments, the big twist arrives and sheds light on some of them ... But it’s tricky because you can only pull a rug away if it exists in the first place.
On the face of it, Fargo creator Noah Hawley’s Before the Fall (Hodder, £14.99) is equally far-fetched. But somehow you don’t notice, even when plane crash survivor Scott Burroughs is swimming through the night with a dislocated shoulder, tugging a child behind him. Among the passengers who did not miraculously survive the private jet’s destruction were David Bateman, head of a Fox News-type network, and Ben Kipling, a banker about to be indicted for money laundering. Burroughs is a painter who was befriended by Bateman’s wife; the child he is towing is Bateman’s son. The engine of the mystery is the accident investigation itself, but Hawley is just as interested in the brutal, dehumanising effects of the way the story plays out across the media landscape Bateman helped to shape. Arguably, the novel is over-designed – the device of looping back to focus in detail on the build-up to the flight for each of the passengers works better in theory than in practice – but it’s beautifully written and consistently thought-provoking.
Benjamin Warner’s debut, Thirst (Bloomsbury, £12.99), tracks the breakdown of society in slow motion from the point of Eddie Chapman’s discovery that the water supply has dried up. That there is no explanation for this doesn’t matter; the rural setting, too, doesn’t feel especially American – Warner seems to be aiming for the universalising opacity of Saramago’s Blindness. The characters are essentially incurious about their fate and oddly trusting in the ability of the authorities to save them. A lethargy is present from the outset – the effects of dehydration just exacerbate it. Warner’s main focus is Eddie and his girlfriend and their struggle to find water – hell, liquid of any sort, even pickling vinegar. Bottled water is the new gold. The problem with Thirst is that it wants us to treat it as a moral fable, yet its insights are banal – we know how scarcity and desperation make people behave.
James Swallow has been the unseen hand behind a mass of SF tie-in novels (for franchises such as Star Trek and Doctor Who) as well as audio dramas and video games. His latest, Nomad (Zaffre, £12.99), is a globe-trotting espionage thriller, its hero Marc Dane a betrayed MI6 operative branded a traitor when he is the only survivor of a botched operation. Dane is a lowly “forward mission specialist” and his rapid ascension to Bond-like superspy will cause your eyebrows to do the full Roger Moore. The cover declares that it’s “for fans of I Am Pilgrim”. In truth it isn’t half as good as that bestseller, and feels as if it has been written in a hurry. It is superior hackwork, though, and very enjoyable.
When the sitter cancels at the last moment, Anne and Marco Conti leave their six-month-old baby Cora home alone while they pop next door for a boozy dinner with their neighbours. But when they return home, the front door is ajar and Cora is gone, even though they only checked on her half an hour before.... So begins The Couple Next Door (Bantam, £12.99), the twisty, frenetic debut of former lawyer Shari Lapena. We share local detective Rasbach’s suspicions that all is not what it seems. And boy, is all not what it seems … There’s tight, effective storytelling here, but the subject matter can’t disguise the thinness of the characters or the way baby Cora is abstracted into a McGuffin.
