It’s London, 1893, and “scullery maids and match girls [are] disappearing left and right”. The gutter press blames “the shadowy malefactors known only as the Spiriters”, but Octavia Hillingdon of the Mayfair Gazette (she writes for the society pages but is desperate to sink her teeth into something meatier) is unconvinced. “‘Shadowy malefactors,’ indeed. It is like something from a bad novel,” she scoffs, before finding herself drawn into the deliciously dark mystery at the heart of Paraic O’Donnell’s The House on Vesper Sands (Orion, £13.99).
Octavia is not the only sleuth on the trail of the missing girls. Enter Gideon Bliss, a verbose, impoverished Cambridge student who comes across a dying girl in a Soho church, and teams up with Inspector Cutter of Scotland Yard in an attempt to save her.
O’Donnell clearly revels in his storytelling, whether he’s setting up his utterly chilling opening, or enjoying a wry interchange between Bliss and Cutter. The former is forever attempting to “curb his more scholarly habits of speech”: “Gideon had laid out in his mind the components of a sentence, but saw at once that he must pack them into fewer and stouter boxes.” The latter calls him a “chattering streak of gannet’s shite”. The House on Vesper Sands is tremendously good – and tremendously good fun.
Big Little Lies author Liane Moriarty’s new thriller, Nine Perfect Strangers (Penguin, £18.99), is set, of all implausible places, in a health resort. Nine different sorts of folk arrive to avail themselves of the escape the place offers: kindly middle-aged novelist Frances, reeling after being taken in by a romance scam; young couple Ben and Jessica, trying to save their marriage; a family of three recovering from tragedy; and so on.
It quickly becomes clear that everything is not quite right at Tranquillum House. “In 10 days, you will not be the person you are now,” the guests are told grandly by Masha, who presides over the resort, and events spiral into – well, not exactly dire territory – but we do reach some darkish places. The pleasure here is the skill with which Moriarty inhabits her characters, as she carefully builds the suspense. Take Frances, for example, considering the novel she is reading on the sly (reading is not allowed at Tranquillum House): “The book was meant to be another murder mystery but the author had introduced far too many characters too early, and so far everyone was still alive and kicking. The pace had slowed. Come on now. Hurry up and kill someone,” she urges, as we, too, wait for the axe to fall.
Life gets troubling very quickly for Eleanor in Shirley Barrett’s The Bus on Thursday (Little, Brown, £14.99). After being diagnosed with breast cancer, she finds herself jobless, living with her mother, “with one remaining original breast and a kind of phoney-looking slightly too perky silicone lump alongside it”. She jumps at the chance to take a job as a schoolteacher in a remote Australian town, but her woes pile up as she discovers that not only did her predecessor vanish unexpectedly, but the handsome vacuum cleaner salesman she has fallen for might not be all he seems. Eleanor details her every last feeling in her blog – “Why blog? Good question! To which I can only respond: well, it is better than scrapbooking”; she is an entertainingly sardonic companion on this blackly humorous journey into horror.
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