The Drowned by John Banville (Faber, £18.99)
The latest in Banville’s series set in 1950s Ireland begins with a Mercedes, engine still running, abandoned in a field by the sea in County Wicklow. It’s discovered by the reclusive Denton Wymes, who shortly afterwards encounters the “mad, or drunk, or both” Ronnie Armitage, who claims that his wife left the car abruptly and may have drowned herself. The behaviour of the couple in the nearby cottage, where the two men go to phone the police, is no less bizarre. When a search by the coastguards fails to recover a body, Detective Inspector Strafford is sent from Dublin to investigate. Strafford has problems of his own to contend with – his wife wants a divorce (possible only because the Straffords were married in England, but still no simple matter) and his lover Phoebe, daughter of the lugubrious pathologist Quirke, is pregnant. A beautifully written and intriguing slowburn of a book, in which the various quandaries in the main characters’ private lives are as absorbing as the central mystery, The Drowned is narratively connected to its predecessor but certainly works as a standalone.
The Blue Hour by Paula Hawkins (Doubleday, £22)
The missing spouse in Hawkins’s latest novel is the philandering husband of famous artist Vanessa Chapman; he disappeared without trace 20 years before a bone in one of her “found objects” sculptures was identified as human by a visitor to the Tate. Vanessa herself is now deceased, having spent her last years in virtual seclusion on the Scottish tidal island still inhabited by Grace: old friend, carer, and keeper of the flame. When an art historian arrives with the twin aims of averting a scandal by “clearing up this bone business” and prising the remainder of Chapman’s work, willed to the foundation that employs him, from Grace’s reluctant hands, long-buried secrets are uncovered. With an intricate plot and multiple timelines and perspectives, The Blue Hour is a complex, atmospheric study of ambition, loyalty and betrayal.
