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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
A rare piece of good news: Stephen King’s frequently announced retirement hasn’t actually happened. And instead of showing signs of literary exhaustion, King’s gearshift of genre from horror to crime has brought about a recharging of his creative batteries.
Proof? His new book, Never Flinch (Hodder, £25), is among his most exuberant outings. In a bifurcated narrative, we are back in the company of vulnerable investigator Holly Gibney. A ruthless murderer has promised to kill “thirteen innocents and one guilty” in an act of revenge and atonement. At the same time, Kate McKay, a confrontational women’s rights advocate on a multi-state tour, is plagued by a stalker. Holly is drawn into these two challenges as King takes us into the consciousness of a killer on a trajectory into madness. Moral issues are examined here, raising provocative questions — but never at the expense of storytelling impetus. Despite King’s title, however, readers should expect to flinch.
While working on his thesis on the history of law enforcement in fascist Italy, Carlo Lucarelli interviewed a man who had been an officer in the Italian police force for 40 years. He had been a member of the political police, but, towards the end of the second world war, when the fascists were on the run, he answered to partisan formations then in control of the country. His job? To investigate the fascist hierarchy, his former employers. Lucarelli, however, never finished his doctoral thesis. Instead, the fictional Commissario De Luca was born from his real-life model, and overnight his creator became one of Italy’s most acclaimed crime authors.
The Darkest Winter (Open Borders Press, £18.99, translated by Joseph Farrell), set in the Bologna of 1944, finds the thuggish Black Brigades fighting the SS for control of the city, while the conflicted De Luca struggles to solve three simultaneous murders. This is classic Lucarelli: riveting social history embedded in a pulse-raising murder mystery.
If you’re weary of comfortable Home Counties’ crime and have a taste for redder meat, perhaps you need Karin Slaughter on your reading list. We Are All Guilty Here (HarperCollins, £22) reminds us that her work is an unnerving reworking of the Southern Gothic strain, and Slaughter knows precisely how to take us into the stygian corners of the human psyche. In small town North Falls, Officer Emmy Clifton is dealing with the case of two missing teenage girls and her own guilt over an earlier incident. North Falls is a hotbed of clandestine intrigues (de rigueur for such towns in crime fiction), and if the novel is less excoriating fare than we are used to from Slaughter, it’s still one hell of a ride.
When does Vaseem Khan sleep? The prolific Anglo-Asian novelist already has several authoritative crime series under his belt, including his award-winning Malabar House series set in 1950s India, but now he is about to enter the 007 universe with a series built around Bond’s armourer Q. Clearly feeling underworked, Khan has also delivered a sizeable psychological crime epic, The Girl in Cell A (Hodder, £20), in which forensic psychotherapist Annie Ledet makes the decision to release convicted murderer Orianna Negi. But what happened on the night of the murder? Orianna has no memory. And what hidden strata of corruption underlie the town’s ruthless Wyclerc dynasty? With incest, racism and sexual violence stirred into the mix, this is a heady brew. What crime genre will the protean Khan tackle next?
Equally impressive is Alex North’s The Man Made of Smoke (Michael Joseph, £18.99). Each novel by this author is more authoritative than the one before — which is saying something, as he started with the splendid The Whisper Man. As a child, profiler Dan Garvie encountered notorious serial killer The Pied Piper. And in the present, this monstrous psychopath appears to be alive and active. With a nemesis for Garvie worthy of Thomas Harris, this is Alex North laying siege to our nerves in expert fashion.
Thumbs up for a final trio: SJ Parris is a writer who repeatedly proves that she is one of the most stylish of historical crime practitioners. Traitor’s Legacy (Hemlock, £20) finds England in 1598 awaiting the successor to Elizabeth, and the Queen’s spymaster Robert Cecil asks former agent Sophia de Wolfe to investigate the murder of an heiress. It’s commanding fare. As is Murder in the House of Omari by Taku Ashibe, translated by Bryan Karetnyk (Pushkin Vertigo, £9.99), with 1943 Osaka experiencing a series of gruesome murders of the prosperous Omari family. And Whistle (HQ, £20) has the admirable Linwood Barclay moving into the eerie eldritch territory that Stephen King has vacated.
Barry Forshaw is the author of ‘American Noir’
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