The Wheel of Doll by Jonathan Ames (Pushkin Vertigo, £8.99)
This is perfect hardboiled crime fiction for the 21st century, making excellent use of noir tropes but without the distaste for humanity displayed by writers such as Raymond Chandler. LA investigator Happy Doll is a Buddhist who says prayers for the bad guys and enjoys spending time with his dog. The second novel in the series sees him on the trail of a missing woman who turns out to be a former girlfriend. Mary DeAngelo says she is desperate to find her long-lost mother, a junkie living rough in Washington state, but Doll soon senses something off about both Mary and her husband, and things turn ugly. At once implausible – our hero, a 51-year-old with a single kidney, gets stomped, shot and thrown unconscious into a river, but keeps going – and entirely real, The Wheel of Doll has a propulsive plot, frictionless prose and plenty of dark humour.
Stay Buried by Kate Webb (Quercus, £16.99)
In this Wiltshire-set contemporary police procedural from the historical novelist, DI Matt Lockyer has been demoted to the “cold case” unit after a conflict of personal and professional loyalties. He then receives a surprising phone call from Hedy Lambert, whom he helped put away for murder 14 years earlier. Lockyer has a personal cold case to contend with, too – the killing of his brother Chris during a pub brawl at his 18th birthday, for which no one was ever charged. This is quality stuff: a well-written, deftly plotted whodunnit as well as a moving tale of guilt, grief, isolation and the lengths to which we will go to protect our families. More, please.
Those People Next Door by Kia Abdullah (HQ, £14.99)
Salma and Bilal Khatun are inclined to laugh at the pretensions of the neat Ilford cul-de-sac they have relocated to in order to remove their son, Zain, from bad influences. After an awkward first encounter, Zain strikes up a friendship with Jamie next door, but the adults fare less well: a confrontation over Zain’s anti-racist banner with Jamie’s father Tom leads to an escalating cycle of retribution, and postings on social media make the situation impossible to diffuse. Told from the points of view of Salma, Zain and Tom’s wife Willa, the can’t look/can’t look away pile-up of suspicion, prejudice, status anxiety and othering inevitably ends in tragedy and an appalling final revelation. Timely and powerful, Abdullah’s fourth novel lets no one off the hook.
The Other Half by Charlotte Vassell (Faber, £12.99)
Given the extreme wealth and privilege in Vassell’s debut novel, “The One Percent” might seem a more accurate title. Detective Caius Beauchamp is jogging on Hampstead Heath when he comes across the body of wellness influencer Clemmie O’Hara and is pitchforked into a world of entitlement, inhabited by people with names such as Araminta and Inigo. Clemmie’s rich boyfriend Rupert Achilles de Courcy Beauchamp (no relation to the police officer – he pronounces his surname the posh way) is the main suspect, the corpse having been discovered the morning after his 30th birthday bash, held amusingly at Kentish Town McDonald’s with added cocaine and champers. However, Rupert has an alibi, and so do all the other partygoers … Although some of the satire is heavy-handed, The Other Half is smart, pacy and good fun.
