We don’t learn the name of the protagonist of Scarlett Thomas’s gloriously dark and tangled thriller, The Sleepwalkers (Scribner), for some time, but it’s immediately clear that we are in the hands of that most joyous device, an unreliable narrator, and that she’s out to justify something bad that’s happened. She’s writing a letter to her husband, Richard, to explain why she has left him behind on the Greek island where they’ve come for their honeymoon. Their love, she says, is “forever cursed”; there is another woman involved, Isabella (“I find it so hard to write her name”). We learn of some former guests at the hotel where they’re staying, a couple known as “the sleepwalkers”, who walked into the sea and drowned. Our narrator is prone to the dramatic – looking at a painting of some tulips, she says “the red flowers looked like large wine glasses full of blood, or – and I have no idea why I thought this – stuffed with meat”.
She’s hard to trust: “From now on, everything I say I will imagine you disagreeing with, saying ‘It wasn’t like that’ or ‘You’re not being fair.’” Thomas, author of the acclaimed The End of Mr Y, tells her story through fragments of letters, torn notebook pages and audio transcripts; it’s a lot of fun trying to work out the truth of what’s happened, and I’m not sure I ever really got there, but that didn’t remotely affect my enjoyment of this clever thriller. As one character later says, critiquing one version of the story (because there are many), it’s “too experimental and too dark. They said they still didn’t know who the sleepwalkers really were and who, if anyone, had killed them.” This isn’t too experimental, it’s just dark enough, and I highly recommend it.
In Stig Abell’s debut, Death Under a Little Sky, burned-out detective Jake Jackson moved to the countryside for a fresh start. Inevitably, some crimes arrived on his doorstep for him to solve; now, in Jackson’s second outing, Death in a Lonely Place (HarperCollins), Abell is faced with the challenge of all authors who set their stories in a cosy village in the middle of nowhere – what unlikely evil is going to visit this remote location next? This time around, the abduction of a little girl reminds Jackson of an old case and a secretive, powerful group called No Taboo; he is (of course) pulled into the investigation of these people and their foul desires, much to (of course) the anger of his new love, Livia. (“I’m just a country vet, remember. This is the first time I’ve been involved in a hodgepodge taskforce to fight an evil conspiracy.”) There are lots of delightful detective-novel references, lots of derring-do in the wintry countryside, lots of evocative insights into Jackson’s appealingly ascetic lifestyle, and a fun and deadly country house set piece. It is a pleasure to be back in the company of Jackson and co.
A double murder has already happened years before Erin Kelly’s The House of Mirrors (Hodder & Stoughton) opens, and a man, Rex, has already spent years in jail for the killings. Kelly, known for twisty thrillers such as The Skeleton Key, begins her story as Alice, daughter of Rex and Karen, is opening a store selling secondhand dresses (the excellently named Dead Girls’ Dresses) in Islington, London. Rex and Karen never mention the past, never mention Rex’s bohemian, malign sister, Biba, who vanished after the killings and is presumed dead. But someone has started sending anonymous notes to Alice and she starts to believe that perhaps her dad Rex didn’t do what everyone believes he did on that night back in 1997. How many secrets are her parents really keeping – and does Alice have secrets of her own? There are mysteries galore and even a doppelganger in this many layered family thriller, and it is properly chilling to discover who is really pulling all the strings.
Ellie Keel’s debut, The Four (HQ), is set firmly in the burgeoning genre known as “dark academia”. It follows four scholarship students who have arrived for sixth form at elite and exclusive boarding school High Realms. They are bullied horribly by the rich kids who are already there – “the students danced a complex polka of loyalty, honour, and revenge, the steps of which we had not yet learned”. We know from the start that something dreadful is going to happen, and that it will centre on Marta, roommate of narrator Rose, and the cleverest of all of them. “It would have made our lives a lot easier if Marta had simply pushed Genevieve out of our bedroom window that day,” writes Keel, opening her story. The secret at the novel’s heart is disturbing and the friends’ efforts to keep it are believably, if frustratingly, misguided. Boarding school is a very bad call for teenagers, if High Realms is anything to go by.
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