It’s a better class of murder in Sweden
CRIME GEOFFREY WANSELL
VICTIM WITHOUT A FACE by Stefan Ahnhem (Head of Zeus)
AN INTERESTING addition to the pantheon of Nordic noir, this is a debut novel from one of Sweden’s best known film and TV writers — his credits include Henning Mankell’s Wallander series — and it’s already a hit across Europe.
It opens with a series of grisly murders in a small Swedish town where the lead investigator, Fabian Risk, grew up. He has just returned there from working in Stockholm, partly in an effort to salvage his tottering marriage but also to spend more time with his young children.
As the story unfolds, it emerges that all the victims were in the same school class as Risk, which makes him both a potential victim and a potential suspect.
There are echoes of a similar plot in Ian Rankin’s latest Rebus novel, but this expands even further and becomes ever more tortuous as Risk races to unravel a vast plethora of false clues and confusing dead ends. The killer even speaks to him on a mobile phone at one point.
Epic in scale and ambition, this announces a new arrival in the Swedish crime galaxy.
FOLLOW ME by Angela Clarke (Avon)
A FULL-ON, in-your-face debut crime novel subtitled The Hashtag Murderer, this is a spirited depiction of the world of the internet and its trolls, narrated by a suitably tattooed young woman named Freddie Venton.
Eight years earlier, she had been childhood friends with Nasreen Cudmore, an Asian girl who has since become a detective sergeant, and their lives intertwine once more against the background of killings linked to Twitter and Facebook.
Venton works in a coffee shop, but has ambition to become a journalist, which leads her to investigate a killing that she stumbles across almost by accident.
Her hashtag expertise draws her into a police operation, and then to the realisation that someone is using social media as an accessory to murder.
Written in the sharpest style, the story races along, leaving the reader almost as breathless as the heroine — but there is a verve to it that is impossible to resist. A playwright and a screenwriter, Clarke is certainly someone to watch. crime novelist as well as a prolific creator and writer of TV, including BBC’s Silent Witness.
But, for me, his finest creation is DCI Mark Lapslie, who suffers from the rare disorder of synaesthesia, which means his brain converts sounds into tastes and sometimes jumbles them at the same time. The distinctive nature of his condition combined with his intellect and faith in his own intuition make him one of the most interesting detectives in modern crime fiction.
This book opens with the discovery of 12 miniature coffins, each containing a doll. Each coffin depicts a murder, and there are three left open, one of which contains a miniature model of a policeman.
There was a similar plot in one of the finest CSI series on television, and this certainly lives up to that comparison as it emerges that the murderer has been planning his killing spree for years. Immaculately constructed and beautifully observed, it cries out to be made for television.
RETROS VAL HENNESSY
MURDER AT THE OLD VICARAGE by Jill McGown (Pan)
TALK about keeping you on your toes! In McGown’s accomplished whodunnit, the tangle of suspects includes a dodgy vicar who no longer believes in God, his bossy, salt-of-the-earth wife, their married daughter with a black eye and a frisky widow.
The plot unfolds, with twists and red herrings galore, to reveal that each character has a motive for having bashed the victim (a nasty piece of work himself) over the bonce with a poker. Trying to solve this baffling case are two detectives caught up in a steamy tangle of their own.
McGown’s crafty plotting keeps you guessing until the last page in a crime thriller worthy of Agatha Christie herself.
PLAINSONG by Kent Haruf (Picador)
THE intertwining lives of ordinary people are luminously evoked in this beautiful, hypnotic novel.
Set in a fictional rural town in the American West, a father is coping alone with raising his two young sons, a pregnant schoolgirl is turned out of her home by a hateful mother and two isolated bachelor brothers battle to keep their ramshackle farm productive.
When these eccentric oldsters offer shelter to the abandoned girl, we witness the transforming power of human kindness. Haruf never avoids the harsher realities — bullying, sexual violence, despair — or the muddy, messy facts of farming, birth and death. He draws you irresistibly into his spell-binding story. You will feel bereft when you turn the final, wonderful page.