The House
Tom Watson and Imogen Robertson
Sphere, £18.99, pp384
In former Labour party deputy leader Tom Watson’s debut thriller, The House, it is 2022 and the royal commission on virus control is taking “day after day of evidence from nurses who didn’t get the personal protective equipment they needed even as their colleagues started dying around them”. The “mop-haired martyr of Westminster” is still prime minister and there is still a special adviser “shovelling crap in and out of Number 10”.
Owen McKenna, a Labour MP, and Philip Bickford, a Tory, used to be close friends, but have been at loggerheads for years, ever since the tragedy of their old housemate, Jay Dewan, a former rising star in the Labour party. When McKenna is approached by a lobbyist and told to withdraw an innocuous-seeming question in the house or face the consequences of his past being exposed, he starts thinking back over what really happened in 2008.
Watson follows in a long line of politicians writing novels, some making a successful career out of it (Jeffrey Archer), others coming in for something of a pasting (Ann Widdecombe, Iain Duncan Smith). Co-written with the historical novelist Imogen Robertson, The House deserves to do well: it’s intelligent and disturbing, both for its insights into the way politics works and for its glimpses of a post-virus future, where masks and temperature checks are the norm and where a greeting is a bow, accompanied by “the light smile the British still wear when they catch themselves avoiding shaking hands”.
These Women
Ivy Pochoda
Faber, £8.99, pp352
Essie Perry is a Latina cop in Los Angeles with a “white-lady name”. She works in vice, but she believes the four sex workers who have been found with their throats slit, bags over their heads, are the victims of a serial killer who murdered 13 women 15 years earlier and was never caught. Like so many of the women walking the streets on her beat, no one listens to her, no one believes her. “Who else hadn’t been heard? How many other women had tried telling their stories, giving clues, tips, answers?… How many give up? Stop calling?” asks Essie as the truth begin to crystallise for her.
There is a brutal killer at the heart of These Women, but he is in the wings, rather than front and centre. Pochada moves, with great sensitivity and depth, between the perspectives of various women, all marginalised, all ignored, including Dorian, the mother of a murdered daughter whose killer was never found, who pictures “a city full of women like… her. A city of futile, pointless anger. A country. A whole continent”, and Julianna, the little girl who was babysat by Dorian’s daughter years back, who now teeters on the edge of a life in which she’s paid for her body – “One day you’re fine and fierce and still able to pretend you’re in control, that men want you because they want you, not because anything can be had at a price.”
These Women is intense, brutal and glittering, a call to listen to the voices of the ignored: “The mothers. The mothers are chanting. The mothers are heckling the police. The mothers are calling for justice. The mothers are holding photos of their daughters.”
One by One
Ruth Ware
Harvill Secker, £12.99, pp384
What a pleasure to sink into One by One, the latest thriller from In a Dark, Dark Wood author Ruth Ware. Here, Ware sets her story in an exclusive Alpine cabin, where the enjoyably ridiculous employees of an enjoyably ridiculous new music app Snoop have gathered to discuss whether they should sell up or not. Passions run high on this snowy retreat. Then, just after co-founder Eva has apparently vanished on a deadly black run, the cabin is hit by an avalanche and the team start getting picked off one by one. “And then we were six,” says one of them, with a knowing nod to Agatha Christie.
Ware tells her story from two perspectives – that of chalet girl Erin, who has a dark past of her own, and Liz, a former member of the Snoop team who never fitted in with their moneyed backgrounds, but who has a tiny share of the company today and is thus being courted. It’s all rather silly but great fun, as the food starts to run out, the temperature drops, mobile reception goes down and the police still fail to arrive. As various people set off to to try and bring help, it all becomes deliciously cat and mouse, with a blisteringly good escape scene rounding everything off.
A Song for the Dark Times
Ian Rankin
Orion, £20, pp336
Ian Rankin plays a little trick on his readers as A Song for the Dark Times opens. Siobhan Clarke is surveying John Rebus’s empty flat, the life “sucked from it”. It’s a moment of recoil: has our ageing detective really been taken from us? But we soon learn that Rebus has just moved to the flat on the ground floor. Suffering from COPD, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, he’s “getting a bit creaky” and can’t handle the stairs any more. Rebus describes himself as “long retired”, but when he gets a call from his daughter, Samantha, letting him know that her partner has been missing for two days, he’s immediately in his car and heading for the “wild north coast” where Samantha lives to help. He knows she’s going to be the prime suspect in Keith’s disappearance and starts investigating.
As Rebus digs into Samantha’s affair, and into the old prisoner-of-war camp nearby, which Keith had been researching, Siobhan has a murder of her own to solve, that of 23-year-old Salman bin Mahmoud, son of a Saudi billionaire who has been stabbed in the car park of a carpet warehouse. It is always good to be back in Rebus’s company, even more so with Rankin slipping in various hints as to his eventual demise: “John says he wants it put on his gravestone, ‘He listened to the B-sides,” says Siobhan.
• To order The House, These Women, One by One or A Song for the Dark Times go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
