Anna Bradshaw remembers nothing when she wakes in a London hospital after an accident. Her husband, Stephen, feels like a total stranger to her; the details of her life are a mystery. “It is as though there is an impenetrable black box in my head, like the flight recorder of a crashed plane, but it is locked and tightly sealed and there is no way for me to access it.” Meanwhile, in Bristol, Livvy Nicholson has a six-month-old son, a loving new husband, Dominic, and a yearning to get back to work that is being inadvertently thwarted by Dominic’s plans for his own career. There are shades of Before I Go to Sleep, SJ Watson’s debut novel about a woman with amnesia, in Hannah Beckerman’s The Forgetting (Lake Union), but that’s no bad thing: Beckerman gives the amnesia trope her own twist to create a compelling, claustrophobic story. In the best possible way, this is a hugely stressful read, as we watch both women slowly come to realise the truth about their situations, urging them on from the sidelines. I finished it in one huge gulp, excusing myself unilaterally from any family responsibilities I was so desperate to finish it.
Death Under a Little Sky (HarperCollins) is journalist Stig Abell’s first novel and a joyful dive into the detective genre. Jake Jackson is a washed-upcop, disillusioned with his career and his marriage. So when his uncle dies, leaving him a property in the middle of nowhere, he gives it all up to begin a new life off-grid: long runs, morning swims in his private lake, minimal interaction with the world at large and time to read through his uncle’s vast library of detective novels. He is sucked back in, though, both by beautiful neighbour Livia Bennet and by the discovery, during a treasure hunt around the nearby village of Caelum Parvum, or Little Sky, of a young woman’s bones. What really happened to her and who can Jake really trust out here? Abell’s enjoyment of the genre shines through, as Jake ponders what the likes of Jack Reacher might do in a messy situation, and as he and Livia team up to investigate, becoming “Jackson and Bennet, the crime-fighters of Little Sky”, another of crime fiction’s detective duos. I was charmed and engrossed – by Jake’s self-reinvention, by Abell’s eccentric cast of characters (“It’s the middle of the day in a picturesque English church. We are, together, a burnt-out ex-cop, a beautiful vet and a fairly eccentric botanist… I don’t think we should be desecrating a mausoleum”) and by the increasing sense of menace, as Jake digs into what happened to the dead girl.
In Laura Vaughan’s psychological thriller Hazard Night (Corvus), Eve’s husband, Peter, takes a job as a housemaster at his old, minor public school, Cleeve College, remembering his time there as “the best years” of his life. To Eve, public schools are “alien territory”, and at first she commutes to her own job in London, but when she becomes pregnant she gives it up and settles into life at Cleeve. Motherhood drains her – “soon all of Eve’s time was spent waiting, waiting, waiting for the day to pass” – until the new classics teacher, Gabriel Easton, and his wife, Fen, arrive. Fen draws Eve into a game of dares, breaking the school’s various rules: “Plagiarising, cheating, drinking ’n’ drug-taking, lying, stealing, trespassing, failing to report a violation… Any one of those activities is a hundred per cent more fun than another round of watery coffee with the beards” (beards being Cleeve’s delightful term for the “campus wives”). Things escalate, until, on the school’s annual Hazard Night – an evening of pranks after exams are finished – a body is found. Moving between the perspectives of Eve and Alice, the daughter of the school chaplain, Vaughan slowly and ominously unpicks the rotten core of Cleeve, a place where “female rage had little currency” and where privilege ends up being no protection. Atmospheric and sinister.
Mary Higgins Clark’s first suspense novel, Where Are the Children?, was, I think, the book that first made me fall for thrillers – I read this terrifying tale of kidnapped children and marital abuse far too young and absolutely adored it. Now Alafair Burke and the late Higgins Clark have written a sequel, Where Are the Children Now? (Simon & Schuster) in which those kidnapped children Mike and Missy are adults. Melissa is now a lawyer turned true-crime podcaster who has blocked out all memory of the time she was abducted. She has just married a widower with a young daughter, Riley, and is helping her mother, Nancy – who, in the first novel, was accused of murdering her first two children, released on a technicality and then under suspicion for murdering Mike and Missy until she rescued them – to move house. Then Riley disappears from her cot and the past has to be raked up all over again. I enjoyed being back in the company of these well-remembered characters – but really, all this sequel did was make me want to read the original again. Higgins Clark: much missed, seldom bettered.
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