Australian author Chris Hammer’s second novel, Silver (Wildfire, £16.99), picks up journalist Martin Scarsden’s career a few months after the events of his impressive debut, Scrublands, which won a Crime Writers’ Association award this year. Scarsden has been writing a book about why a priest in the outback opened fire on his congregation, and he is now about to set up home with Mandalay Blonde, the woman he met while he was reporting on the case. They plan to move to Port Silver on the coast of New South Wales, the town where he grew up and where – by a fairly hefty coincidence – she has inherited a large, rundown property. Arriving at their rented house, Scarsden finds the corpse of local estate agent Jasper Speight, and a dazed Blonde with blood on her hands. As he tries to prove her innocence, old grievances and tensions over land ownership come to light, and it’s clear his own disturbing past isn’t going to stay buried. Richly descriptive, with a large and well drawn cast, this is an immersive and enjoyable novel that lives up to the promise of its predecessor.
Another antipodean coastal town with plenty of secrets is the setting for a first venture into romantic suspense by paranormal romance author Nalini Singh. A Madness of Sunshine (Gollancz, £14.99) is set on the west coast of New Zealand’s South Island, in the largely Māori town of Golden Cove. Shocked by the sudden death of her husband and the subsequent discovery of his perfidy, classical pianist Anahera Rawiri returns from London to lick her wounds. She gets to know policeman Will Gallagher, a new arrival with plenty of his own baggage. When teenage beauty Miriama goes missing, memories are revived of three female hikers who disappeared 15 years earlier and were never found; Rawiri acts as a bridge between Will and a community that has little trust in either outsiders or authority. Although neither the police procedure nor the characterisation, particularly of the myriad male suspects, is wholly believable – Gallagher appears to be the only half-decent man in the entire place – this is an atmospheric read with a compelling sense of the spectacular rugged landscape.
Gerald Seymour’s 1975 debut, Harry’s Game, was set in Belfast during the Troubles; since then, over the course of thirtysomething novels, he has written about strife in places as diverse as Afghanistan, South Africa and Guatemala. In Beyond Recall (Hodder & Stoughton, £18.99) it’s the Russian Arctic city of Murmansk, virtually sunless in winter and “big on sexually transmitted disease, ferocious seasonal mosquitos, drug abuse and the architecture of Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev”. Traumatised former special operative Gaz, one of two surviving witnesses to an atrocity in a Syrian village, is dispatched there by MI6 agent Knacker – one of the old guard, acting very much off his own bat – to identify the man who oversaw the massacre. Meanwhile, Jasha, a veteran of the Soviet army who lives in an isolated cabin on the tundra, forms a friendship of sorts when he helps a wounded bear. Although the choppy style, all comma splices and dropped pronouns, takes a bit of getting used to, it’s well worth the effort for an old school but highly enjoyable thriller.
Mary Kelly (1927-2017) beat John le Carré to the 1961 CWA gold dagger, but she has been largely forgotten, so it’s good to learn that her 1958 novel The Christmas Egg (British Library, £8.99) has been reissued. On 22 December Inspector Brett Nightingale is called to a squalid north London flat, in which elderly Russian refugee Princess Olga Karukhina lies dead. The circumstances are suspicious, with an empty trunk under the bed leading Nightingale to believe that valuable objects from the deceased’s imperial past have been stolen. Darker and more psychologically acute than much conventional golden age fare, and with less reliance on the puzzle element, The Christmas Egg has a surprising amount of action as the quest for the treasures becomes ever more dangerous.
Lastly, in a category all of its own, The Lammisters by Declan Burke (No Alibis, £16.99) is a metafictional tale of bootleggers and starlets on the run from the LAPD in 1920s Hollywood, their exploits fuelled by bathtub hooch swigged from teacups. Yes, there’s a plot, but that’s not really the point, because the book is written in the discursive manner of Laurence Sterne, with an overanxious, officious narrator who is soon forced to admit that he is having difficulty keeping tabs on what’s going on. A triumph of absurdity, which burlesques the literary canon from Shakespeare, Pope and Austen to Flann O’Brien, Damon Runyan and PG Wodehouse, so that the act of reading becomes a detective story in itself, The Lammisters is very clever indeed. Its central hypothesis – that the world might be a better place if everyone made a little more effort to get along – makes it perfect reading for the season of goodwill.
