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.
