CRIME AND THRILLERS
END OF WATCH by Stephen King (Hodder £20) THIS is the final episode of the spellbinding trilogy that began with King’s Mr Mercedes, featuring the mass-killer Brady Hartsfield and his epic struggle with Detective Bill Hodges, who has now retired from the force and set up as a private investigator.
Hodges suspects Hartsfield has been fooling the world by pretending to be unresponsive in hospital so he can avoid the incarceration that will inevitably follow his trial.
As the story unfolds, it emerges that the killer has developed exceptional powers that allow him to take over the minds and bodies of people he comes into contact with, often encouraging them to suicide.
Gradually, Hartsfield’s evil web expands until it becomes almost too painful to read on: this is, literally, unputdownable. A HERO IN FRANCE by Alan Furst (Weidenfeld & Nicolson £18.99) NEW YORK-born Furst’s sumptuous prose lights up this subtle evocation of Paris in the spring of 1941, as the French Resistance begins to organise against the occupying German army and help British airmen shot down over France to reach the Spanish border and safety.
It centres on a resistance leader, Mathieu, who is mobilising support and who will risk everything to make sure the Allied cause is never abandoned.
Eloquently told, with Furst’s customary mastery of both atmosphere and character — not to mention his delicate touch with tension — it is confirmation he is a writer without peer in the recreation of wartime espionage. SECRETS OF DEATH by Stephen Booth (Sphere £18.99) SET IN his native Peak District, this is Booth’s latest instalment of the travails of DI Ben Cooper and DS Diane Fry of Derbyshire CID.
Utterly compelling, and told with stark authority, it is a British police procedural that bristles with reality and humanity on every page.
A series of apparent suicides at beauty spots, which are being called ‘suicide tourism’, seem mysteriously to be linked as some of the victims are found with a business card that reads simply: ‘Secrets of death’.
Are they being orchestrated in some way? Cooper and Fry have to find out before more die.
This is crime writing of the finest quality, and it is no surprise that there is a television version on the horizon.