It is 2019, Donald Trump is still president, and Attica Locke’s protagonist Darren Mathews, one of the few Black men to be a Texas Ranger, can’t “shake this feeling that something truly awful was coming their way”. Guide Me Home (Viper) is the final instalment of Locke’s excellent Highway 59 series, and things aren’t going well for Darren. He’s drinking heavily – “managing his sense of doom was nearly a full-time job for Darren these days” – and has handed in his badge after lying and manipulating evidence (for good reasons) in his previous outing, Heaven, My Home. Then his mother, Bell, with whom he has a complicated, troubled relationship, shows up, and tells him that a girl has gone missing from the sorority house she cleans at a nearby college. “You know how they do with missing Black girls, how you can’t get no one to pay attention,” she tells him. Darren doesn’t want to listen, but finds himself digging into the mystery of a disappearance that even the girl’s own family don’t seem to care about. Lyrical, complex and deeply engaged with the simmering tensions beneath (and above) the surface of American life, this is top-quality crime fiction.
Blake Crouch’s science fiction thriller Dark Matter was recently adapted for television starring Joel Edgerton and Jennifer Connelly. Run (Macmillan), which Crouch self-published in 2011 and is now coming out in hardback, could plausibly take the same route. We follow a family – dad Jack (whom I envisioned as Edgerton), mum Dee (Connelly in my eyes), teenage daughter Naomi and young son Cole – as a series of brutal murders starts to sweep the US. Many people, but not all (for reasons that are made clear but not explicable), have been overtaken by a murderous rage and are killing all those who aren’t similarly murderous. Once you accept that premise, Run is a lot of fun, as Jack and co leave their home and embark on a wild dash for safety, constantly running out of petrol, searching for food, escaping people with guns, etc. It’s thrilling and ridiculous and filled with bits such as this: “Someone, he went on. Hands and knees. Mindless hours. Always climbing. Endless.”
Spooky season is nearly upon us, so it’s high time for some thrills with a supernatural edge. First up is Erin E Adams’s brilliant Jackal (Dead Ink Books), in which Liz Rocher is reluctantly returning to her home town of Johnstown, Pennysylvania, for her best friend Mel’s wedding. Liz has bad memories of her childhood there – she was one of the few Black children in her school and growing up was miserable for her; she also has ill-defined and creepy memories of a childhood trauma in the woods that surround the town – but she’s back for Mel, and her beloved goddaughter, Caroline. But during the wedding, late in the evening, Caroline disappears from where she was playing on the edge of the trees. As the hours tick by and the police and the locals fail to find her, Liz investigates on her own and finds that Caroline isn’t the first to be lost in the woods. “One girl – one Black girl a summer. Starting the year we were born.” As the locals say: don’t listen, if someone calls your name from the trees. Don’t look. Stay home during the solstice. Eerie and disturbing, Jackal is a perfect autumnal read.
Carly Reagon’s Hear Him Calling (Sphere) moves the creepy action to rural Wales. Kyle, Lydia and their baby son, Jamie, have moved from London to an isolated tower halfway up a mountain, after Kyle inherited the property from his grandfather. “Haven’t we always dreamed of the country? Getting away from it all? Bringing up our family somewhere safe?” Kyle says, rather ominously. Lydia sees a light moving up the mountain at night, and feels a constant sense of looming threat. The locals seem to hate the English newcomers – all apart from shopkeeper Eleri, who tells them of how Kyle’s grandfather went mad before he died… just like those who lived in the house before him. Add to this a stain on the counter that won’t go away, Kyle’s darkening personality, and a spooky ghostly photograph from up the mountain, and it makes you wonder why Lydia would stay. But that’s half the fun, and stay she does, as blinds keep popping open to let in scary lights even though she nails them down, and the scent of cigarette smoke keeps wafting to her despite the fact she doesn’t smoke. As a regular consumer of crime and horror novels, I’d have been gone at the first hint of any of this, but I very much enjoyed watching Lydia foolishly stick it out, and my shivers of dread were such that I had to wait until I wasn’t alone in the house to finish this book.
• To order Guide Me Home, Run, Jackal and Hear Him Calling, click on the titles or go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
