The days are lengthening and the temperature warming, so what better time to journey as far south as possible during winter? RS Burnett’s Whiteout (HarperCollins) follows Rachael on a solo Antarctic expedition. She’s already dealing with temperatures of -69C, weeks with no company and endless night (“She felt like she was drowning in it, as if the darkness was leaking into her little hut, ready to overwhelm her at any moment”). Then the radio and satellite phones cut out, and she hears a BBC World Service broadcast from London. “This country has been attacked with nuclear weapons… the number of casualties and the extent of the damage are not yet known.” Rachael may, she thinks, “be one of the last people alive on Earth”. When her hut burns down, she is forced to embark on a likely hopeless trek across the dark and frozen continent.
Survival stories are my favourite sort of thriller, and Whiteout, set in the most inhospitable place on the planet, certainly piles on the danger (along with the chills). I wasn’t totally convinced by Rachael’s reasons for being in Antarctica in the first place, but once you accept her Very Important Scientific Mission and lean into the string of disasters she keeps having to confront, it is tons of fun.
From Antarctica to Nashville, and an even more terrifying danger than the frozen continent: a serial killer dad. Tariq Ashkanani’s The Midnight King (Viper) follows Nathan’s return to his childhood home after the death of his father, Lucas Cole. Lucas was a bestselling novelist who brought up his two children alone after the death of his wife. He was also a serial killer, the murderer of at least 13 children. This is something Nathan has known since he was a child, something he has tried to run away from, but “wherever he looked, it was always straight down into the dark”. Searching through his late father’s belongings, Nathan finds an unpublished manuscript Lucas left behind – a novel, of sorts, but one that bears a terrible resemblance to the crimes he committed. With Lucas recently deceased, will Nathan and his old friend, Isaac, be able to save the last victim he locked away before it’s too late? I found this book immensely disturbing, reminiscent of Mo Hayder at her darkest.
Callie Kazumi’s Cuckoo (Cornerstone) follows the travails of Claire, a seemingly innocent young woman who starts the novel full of joy over her recent engagement to Noah and ends it in a very dark place indeed. Claire, we learn from her diary, works in PR, peppers her writing with exclamation marks and ponders such weighty issues as whether a Jaffa Cake is a cake or a biscuit (“Noah says cake because of the spongy texture, and I’m inclined to agree”). But a bleaker reality soon starts to show itself. We learn more and more about Claire’s appalling childhood, and discover, after she decides to surprise Noah with lunch at his fancy City job, that he hasn’t worked at the company for months and now he won’t return her calls. Claire starts to explore who Noah really is as we wait for him to get his comeuppance and learn her true story. Another great debut.
My final read this month is a good old police procedural: former Metropolitan police detective Neil Lancaster’s When Shadows Fall (HQ), the latest case for DS Max Craigie. I’ve not read the previous novels in the Craigie series, but was taken by Lancaster’s premise: the body of a woman is found at the bottom of a Scottish mountain, the sixth to die in this way in a year. All were experienced climbers; all were alone; all were blond. “All well-prepared, decent weather, firm tracks and no sign of any daft behaviour… What if someone is targeting lone women climbers, and shoving them off cliffs?” I enjoyed the network of evil and corruption that lay behind these deaths, slowly revealed by Craigie and his team as they investigate, and I was pleasantly terrified by the situations Lancaster painted for the climbers as they met their ends. Joining a series in the middle is never a brilliant idea, however, and the ins and outs of Craigie’s personal life were less intriguing for me. So I recommend the author, but suggest that those who don’t know the collection join me in starting with the first Craigie novel, Dead Man’s Grave, which was longlisted for the 2021 McIlvanney prize for Scottish crime book of the year.
• To order Whiteout, The Midnight King, Cuckoo or When Shadows Fall, click on the titles or go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
