A powerful conclusion to her Highway 59 trilogy, Attica Locke’s Guide Me Home (Viper, £18.99) should earn her new readers. Darren Mathews has a lot on his plate: a Black man facing indictment for his suspected role in the death of a white nationalist, he’s just resigned from the Texas Rangers when his estranged mother, Bell, reappears, asking him to find Sera, a young Black woman missing from her university.
Though he mistrusts Bell, Darren’s drawn into the case, and soon focuses on Thornhill, the company town where Sera’s family lives in an updated form of sharecropping barely veiled by phrases like “compassionate capitalism”. Picking up a thread of crime fiction that runs back at least to Hammett’s Red Harvest, Locke pointedly sets this case against the grim backdrop of “America’s latest madness, its toe-dip into dystopia, fascism under the guise of a return to better days, nostalgia as a slow, magnolia-scented death.” Locke makes this compelling by integrating these politics into the characters’ lives, depicting their bruising experiences of “losing things faster and faster every day until our new reality was just a bunch of sad days strung together that we didn’t hardly recognise”.
Sera’s case resonates with Darren’s own complicated family stories of grief and alienation, and the loss of the career that had defined him, a loss that threatens his ability to believe in certain kinds of justice. Locke infuses those cross currents with a fierce tenderness, making Guide Me Home a deeply impressive, moving novel and a highlight of the year.
Historical crime fiction, particularly set in the second World War, had a strong September, not least in standouts by James R Benn and Michael Russell. The Phantom Patrol (Soho, £26.99), Benn’s 19th Billy Boyle mystery, is set in post-liberation Paris in the winter of 1944. Along with Parisians who never fled, the city is swimming in Allied soldiers and gangs that include “professional criminals who’d fought with the Resistance, fascist militiamen now gone underground, and policemen who’ve been kicked off the force”. Among these gangs are the Syndicat du Renard – “deserters from all sides” – who traffic in plundered art, looking to profit from the war’s chaos.
Members of the US army’s Counter Intelligence Corps – including former cop Boyle, writer-in-the-making Jerome Salinger, and Lieut Piotr “Kaz” Kazimierz – are investigating the syndicat. After recovering a Renaissance drawing, they turn to the brilliant art expert Rose Valland, who had remained in Paris throughout the Occupation, “a spy, hidden in plain sight”, diligently tracking artwork stolen by the Nazis. Along the way, they must navigate the French police, including some who are belatedly questioning their own complicity during the Occupation.
Immersed in period research, the plotting makes The Phantom Patrol a satisfying read, but Benn’s nuanced consideration of the emotional marks that war leaves on those who survive provides his mystery with its real heart.
Michael Russell’s Garda Insp Stefan Gillespie returns in The Dead City (Constable, £15.99), continuing one of the most engrossing Irish series. Focusing on the autumn of 1944, when the fall of Nazi Germany seems inevitable, this ninth Gillespie novel is as memorable as the first.
Gillespie’s on leave, enjoying some semblance of a normal existence in west Wicklow, when he’s appointed to help the Irish minister in Berlin extract himself from a collapsing Germany without undermining Ireland’s neutrality. Central among his orders is locating Frank Ryan in Berlin: the Irish government’s worried that, as the war’s end looms, Ryan could be “a loose end” if not “a loose cannon”. So, while finding “Frank Ryan alive would be good”, Gillespie’s given to understand “Dead would also do.” Amidst the chaotic winter of 1944-1945, preoccupied with getting other Irish citizens out, the minister considers Ryan an “embarrassment” and offers Gillespie little help in weaving his way through the collapsing Nazi state without getting caught in its snares.
Attuned to the intricate moral conflicts of compromise and allegiance, particularly around Ryan’s place in wartime Germany, and to all the ways one might avoid seeing the cattle cars heading east, The Dead City continues Russell’s searching exploration of neutral Ireland during the second World War. Though no less skilled at tense plotting than Benn, Russell’s work here is, as ever, keenly reflective, closer to John le Carré than to Alan Furst.
Crime fiction seems increasingly open to elements from other genres. Two new Irish releases, by Stuart Neville and Ian McDonald, bring together thriller and supernatural elements very well indeed.
Set in the small towns and backroads of western America, Neville’s Blood Like Mine (Simon & Schuster, £18.99) is a terrifically entertaining book with the same tense pacing and persuasive characters of his earlier Belfast novels. As did The Twelve, Blood Like Mine opens a rich vein of the supernatural, giving this latest novel its distinct voice.
The plot weaves together two main lines. In one, FBI Special Agent Marc Donner has been pursuing an apparent serial murderer for two years, paying a high personal and professional price. In the other, Rebecca Carter and her daughter Monica have been living out of their van as they roam the country, enduring “an unreal reality of endless roads and perpetual motion”. Much of the suspense revolves around the Carters and what role they might have in Donner’s case.
If that set-up might initially seem familiar, things quickly become far less certain and more unsettling when Donner investigates the gruesome murder of a paedophile, which matches the profile of his serial killer case. Soon, he arrests Rebecca, with dramatic consequences no one at first understands. Even when answers arrive, they’re no comfort, for the shape they take is not a rational one.
First gradually, then with visceral force, that shape becomes terribly clear and the tension erupts into bloody violence. Neville deftly sets this violence, gory as it can be, alongside the novel’s affectingly complex family relationships. In particular, Rebecca and Monica’s uniquely loving, dangerous bond lingers well after the closing image.
Ian McDonald’s The Wilding (Gollancz, £25) is a sharp thriller with a healthy dose of folk horror. Its characters all live in contemporary Ireland, but that life quickly proves less stable and secure than they thought when mysterious ancient forces re-emerge from the rewilded Lough Carrow bog.
The main action is compressed to a few suspenseful days, as the young Ranger Lisa leads a group of secondary students on a school hiking trip around the bog. McDonald establishes his leads well, particularly Lisa – whose criminal experience as a gang’s driver proves useful – and Saoirse, one of the students. Vivid secondary characters include gentrifiers drawn to the area with a suspiciously keen taste for its darker folklore.
Almost immediately, there are warning signs that the trip won’t go as planned: dead farm and forest animals are discovered, brutally dismembered in ways no known predator could do. As more unnerving events pile up, the threat steadily increases: clearly, something’s changed on the bog, to the excitement of the creepy gentrifiers and the terror of Lisa’s students. Will Lisa be able to see them through?
With strong characterisation, a deep sense of place and real wit, McDonald keeps the answer to that question up in the air in entertaining and often surprising ways.
