Hunted by Abir Mukherjee (Harvill Secker, £14.99)
For his first standalone novel, Mukherjee, author of a crime series set in 1920s India, has turned his attention to contemporary America. During the last week of a toxic presidential campaign, a bomb in a California shopping mall claims 65 lives. A group called the Sons of the Caliphate claims responsibility, but when FBI agent Shreya Mistry begins to close in on them, she discovers not jihadists, but something altogether more complicated. Meanwhile, the parents of two group members – Carrie, whose son Greg is a former US soldier, and British Muslim Sajid, whose daughter Aliyah was radicalised after her activist sister received life-changing injuries during a demonstration – team up to find their children before any more atrocities are committed, becoming fugitives themselves in the process. With multiple narrators, a fast pace and a horribly credible storyline, this white-knuckle ride across a catastrophically fractured country grips from start to finish.
Bonehead by Mo Hayder (Hodder & Stoughton, £22)
Hayder’s untimely death in 2021 robbed us of an imagination unparalleled in both its darkness and its audacity. Her final novel, Bonehead, is as haunting and distinctive as its predecessors. In a Gloucestershire community years after a coach crash in which six teenagers were killed, blame and rumour still abound. Dogs go missing and the eponymous faceless woman, thought to be a ghost, drifts through woods where nature itself seems entirely malevolent. Survivor Alex, now a police officer, is determined to discover what really happened on the night of the crash, when she glimpsed Bonehead seconds before the coach left the road. Although there is an imbalance to this book, presumably because of the circumstances in which it was written – the ending seems rushed in contrast to the expertly paced ratcheting of tension in the first half – the final page is a classic Hayder shocker.
