All the Colours of the Dark by Chris Whitaker (Orion, £20)
Set in a small town in Missouri, the British author’s novel more than lives up to the promise of its award-winning predecessor, We Begin at the End. Outsiders Patch and Saint are childhood friends whose lives are irrevocably shaped by contact with a serial killer. Patch is abducted by the man, who imprisons him in darkness where he is visited by a girl. Although he never sees her, an intensely strong bond is formed – but when he escapes, no trace of her is found. The general consensus is that she was a figment of his imagination, but Patch spends years searching for her, and Saint, who loves him, becomes a police officer in order to help. A coming-of-age story as well as a crime novel, the book spans the years from 1975 to 2001, an epic sweep that takes in themes of hope, loss and keeping faith, as well as how the personal is political. Ambitious, powerful and moving, this is a tour de force.
The God of the Woods by Liz Moore (Borough, £16.99)
The Van Laar banking family own a chunk of land in New York state’s Adirondack Mountains, including a summer camp for teenagers. When their 13-year-old daughter Barbara goes missing from her cabin in August 1975, history seems to be repeating itself – her older brother Bear vanished without trace in 1961, aged eight. Speculation grows that Barbara has been taken by a recently escaped prisoner, serial killer Jacob “Slitter” Sluiter. Sluiter is thought by many to have been responsible for Bear’s disappearance, rather than the groundsman who was arrested and died in police custody. But nobody is sure, as, despite loudly banging the drum for self-reliance, the Van Laar clan, to whom reputation is all, have a habit of getting others to do their dirty work … Told through multiple points of view, and shifting between the 1950s and the summer of Barbara’s disappearance, this is an intricate and emotionally engaging exploration of class and family dynamics, and a top-notch literary thriller.
Imposter Syndrome by Joseph Knox (Doubleday, £18.99)
Although more traditional in form than his previous book, True Crime Story, Knox’s latest is equally intriguing. A chance meeting between con artist Lynch and wealthy, troubled Bobbie, who tells him that he is the doppelganger of her missing brother Heydon, provides an entrée into her family’s heavily guarded Chelsea home. Here the story departs from the standard impostor narrative as Lynch is immediately rumbled and put to work to discover what really happened to Heydon, whose car was found abandoned on Chelsea Bridge five years earlier. Although Lynch, like all good con artists, remains frustratingly opaque, the chicane-packed plot will repay the attention you’ll need to give it, and there’s some sharp dialogue and a surprising number of laughs along the way. Buckle up and enjoy.
How Can I Help You by Laura Sims (Verve, £9.99)
Another impostor can be found in American poet and novelist Sims’s latest book, this time with a far darker past. Cheerful and endlessly patient, Margo is always on hand to help at the midwestern public library where she works. What nobody knows is that she is actually Jane Rivers, a former nurse whose compulsion to kill her patients has meant that she has needed to reinvent herself to stay ahead of the law. However, when a library user collapses in the toilet, Margo can’t resist the pull of her old habits – and new reference librarian Patricia has seen enough to make her suspicious. A wannabe novelist, Patricia, who begins researching Margo’s past, doesn’t want to turn her in but turn her into fiction. As Margo grows increasingly suspicious of Patricia, they circle each other warily, passing the narrative baton between them. Inspired by the real-life case of 19th-century killer nurse “Jolly” Jane Toppan, this is a marvellously intense, read-in-one-sitting game of cat and mouse among the book stacks.
The Exile by Patrick Worrall (Bantam, £16.99)
The prequel to Worrall’s excellent debut, The Partisan, begins in 1951, when Lithuanian freedom fighter Greta is tasked with escaping to France to find a partisan general’s daughter, who was sent abroad, aged 12, during the second world war. She is supposed to have been kept safe by relatives, but the letters that purport to come from her are forgeries, and nobody knows where she is. Meanwhile, soldier Lucien has been brought home from French Indochina to help keep tabs on the Corsican mafia in the shape of his cousin Paul. Worrall wonderfully conjures the maelstrom of postwar France as its empire begins to disintegrate, teeming with displaced people, former Nazis, Soviet spies, Algerian agitators, gangsters and spivs, in a dramatic and thoroughly immersive account of loyalty, ideology and betrayal.
