If Stephanie Merritt’s While You Sleep (HarperCollins, £12.99) were a horror film, its protagonist, Zoe Adams, would have you shouting at the screen as she repeatedly refuses to take seriously the signs of approaching peril.
Zoe arrives on a remote Scottish island to find some peace, and to paint, as her marriage falls apart. She’s rented the McBride house, and owner Mick Drummond is strangely reluctant to let her learn anything about its past. On her first night on the island a barmaid tells her: “Staying out there on your own. In the middle of nowhere. That’s brave.” As the whispers and rumours coalesce, she learns its history – how a widow is said to have gone mad there a century ago, and killed her son; how a local boy vanished there on a dare the previous year. On her first night at the house, Zoe hears scratching sounds, mournful laments, and wakes from a strange, sexual dream with bruises like teeth marks. She keeps on dismissing events as mere “night terrors”, even when she learns that the house was built on the remains of a ruined chapel, itself built on an ancient pagan site.
Merritt, who writes historical crime as SJ Parris, tells an alarmingly unnerving story here, shrewdly avoiding turning Zoe into a damsel in distress as she piles on the deliciously gothic chills.
Christine Mangan’s debut, Tangerine (Little, Brown, £13.99), gives us another woman in danger to add to the current surfeit. Alice Shipley is living with her husband in the “still, arid heat” of 1950s Tangier, troubled by the “vaporous sheen” of her memories, and never leaving their apartment. These disturbing memories are packed “in boxes secure enough to ensure they would never let loose the secrets held within”. Mangan’s narrative flips between two perspectives – Alice’s and that of a former college roommate, Lucy Mason, who features darkly in Alice’s backstory and who now turns up in Tangier to see her. With the time shifting between the present and the past, each of the women recall their version of an event that took place “in the cold, wintry Green Mountains of Vermont”.
The novel has been optioned for a film by George Clooney, with Scarlett Johansson set to star. It is an accomplished, ominous, evocative tale of spiralling obsession, skilfully pulled off – although next month I might put a temporary moratorium on unreliable female narrators before I become one myself.
Come and Find Me (Headline, £18.99), the latest Marnie Rome novel, is a typically expert outing from Sarah Hilary. This time her detective, Rome, who is also in no way a damsel in distress despite her tragic past, takes on the escape from jail of one Michael Vokey. Horribly creepy, Vokey was imprisoned for an attack on a woman; it was “the perfect place for him to escalate to full-blown murder”, and he leaves a scene of unspeakably foul devastation behind him as he flees.
Twisty and full of dead ends, Come and Find Me leads the reader on a merry dance as Rome and her crew try to track him down, dealing with everyone from the women who wrote disturbing letters to Vokey in prison, to his former cellmate, now hospitalised. Rome is as pleasingly astute as ever, and it is good to see the continued travails of her supporting cast. Hilary has created a series that I hope will run and run.
• To order While You Sleep for £11.04, Tangerine for £12.74 or Come and Find Me for £16.14 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
