Sara Gran’s Little Mysteries: Nine Miniature Puzzles to Confuse, Enthrall, and Delight (Dreamland, £14.99) delivers on the full subtitle. Although several of these sharply playful stories feature two characters – Claire DeWitt and Cynthia Silverton – from Gran’s excellent earlier novels, this varied collection stands well on its own.
These “puzzles” often focus on small moments and big disturbances. DeWitt’s cases, for example, draw unexpected solutions from deceptively mundane matters, filtered through reserves of empathy even for the perpetrators. The “best detective in the world,” DeWitt and her methods reflect a weary wisdom: “if you’re looking for logic, look elsewhere, and good luck, because I have yet to see any in this life.” With their own juxtapositions, the Silverton cases – a little bit Carolyn Keene, a little bit Roald Dahl for adults – use a seemingly effervescent teen detective to navigate darkly metaphysical crises.
The result is a strange, smart volume of self-reflective mysteries with little fixed trajectory, bearing titles such as The Case of the Jewel in the Lotus Or The Mystery You Will Never Quite Solve, but If You’re Lucky, Will Come a Little Closer to Every Day Until Death. Postmodern and clever, Little Mysteries is a deeply affecting collection, its comic moments fuelling concise conclusions such as “Some days it feels like people exist just to break your heart ... sometimes it feels like entire months, years, whole decades exist just to hurt us like it’s their f***ing hobby.” Across this continually surprising book, Gran’s fearless writing reveals a profound way with the world’s irreconcilable emotional complexities.
Michael Idov’s spy thriller The Collaborators (Simon & Schuster, £18.99) is a lean, entertaining read. Deploying the right amount of gallows humour to lighten (slightly) the post-Soviet Eastern European, American and Chinese intrigues, Idov develops his characters well, giving the international plot very human stakes. There’s a good cast of secondary characters, but the real spark’s in his leads, Latvia-based CIA officer Ari Falk and Los Angeles heiress/actress Maya Chou.
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The Collaborators begins dramatically when a Belarusian fighter jet forces a passenger plane to land. Several travellers are removed, including a mysterious couple (whose significance isn’t immediately clear) and a blogger trying to flee Russia posthaste, fearing the Kremlin’s learned that he’s one of Ari’s sources. Across the globe, Maya awakens to her billionaire father’s suicide note, and the news that his investment management fund is suddenly empty.
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Ari’s case and Maya’s loss are soon pulled together by a web of conspiracies rooted in Yeltsin-era Russia, whose cloak-and-dagger survivors remain haunted by their what-could-have-beens and the continuing fallout from the foreign policy hubris of messianic good intentions. While Ari and Maya navigate these competing agendas and long memories, Idov keeps The Collaborators sprinting along to a satisfyingly unsettled conclusion.
Julia Dahl’s poignant fifth novel, I Dreamed of Falling (No Exit, £9.99), is set in a small Hudson Valley town dotted with businesses that didn’t survive the pandemic, and close enough to New York to offer a soft landing for gentrifiers leaving the city.
The story centres on Roman Grady, his partner Ashley Lillian, their young son Mason, Roman’s mother, Tara, and her fiancé, John, all of whom share the family home. Roman and Ashley almost escaped the town, Ashley as a yoga instructor and Roman for a fellowship at the Los Angeles Times, before an unplanned pregnancy and Covid restrictions kept them stuck in place. Now, like most people they know, they’re barely hanging on, stability just out of reach through chance and circumstance, when Ashley dies mysteriously outside a friend’s house.
Everyone’s immersed in their grief, but it’s soon clear Ashley’s death isn’t what it seems. What follows is full of heartbreak, as Roman and Tara uncover the small-town corruption that exploits and derails lives like theirs, a corruption fuelled, Dahl pointedly notes, by the slow death of local journalism. The climactic revelations work so well because they’re scrupulously grounded in Dahl’s characters. Richly drawn, these people are vivid in all their flaws. They make I Dreamed of Falling such a quietly moving novel, shot through with their tangled fears, thwarted hopes, and fierce loves.
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Two distinctive recent novels – Rachel Donohue’s The Glass House and TC Parker’s Tradwife – bring mystery writing to bear on the crimes of resurgent (if disingenuously rebranded) fascism.
The fragile, elusive mysteries of Donohue’s The Glass House (Corvus, £14.99) revolve around the burden of memories. Most of these concern a family saga, largely narrated by Aisling Acklehurst as it shifts between 1963 and 1999.
The former is the year Aisling starts at Trinity, leaving the “strange modernist utopia” of the Galway home where she and her sister Stella spent their adolescence. It’s also the year she learns that a barely veiled fascism permeates her philosopher father’s writings, and that many of his houseguests are not-so-former Nazis seeking rehabilitation. This knowledge leaves her wondering “how many of us have to live with the consequences of a man’s bloated self-belief, and his dangerous delusions; and at what cost.”
Cutting even closer are the crimes she learns he’s committed in their home. He’ll pay for those crimes on a snowy New Year’s Eve, a night that complicates the sisters’ bond. Over 30 years later, they return to Galway for a final confrontation with their father’s followers, specious academics trying to make his fascism a cottage industry and his home a pilgrimage site for a new far right.
A graceful sorrow permeates this ruminative, often beautiful novel, which shares some of the Gothic atmospherics of mysteries like Laura or Rebecca. Here, those atmospherics draw their emotional weight not only from Aisling and Stella’s long efforts to remedy their father’s vicious crimes, but also from their experience that, when one has “a notorious parent … You exist only by extension, a shadow person, never quite finished”.
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Parker’s Tradwife (Nefarious Bat, £10.99) opens with a gruesome murder: five years before, partial remains of three couples were found after a dinner party, “not in a conventional suburban neighbourhood … but in the Heart of Solomon: Britain’s first, and, so far, only dedicated Tradwife community”. This cult-like settlement was founded with small donations from “men’s rights” message board denizens, large ones from chain pub-owning Brexiteers, and secret funding by American Christian Nationalists. As that suggests, Tradwife unambiguously plants its flag against the most virulently patriarchal right-wing currents.
The Heart of Solomon leaders have earned so many enemies – families abandoned, donors swindled – that there’s no shortage of viable suspects, and the murders remain unsolved. Most of what we learn about the case comes from a sociological study-in-progress by Gina Lewis, which presents the settlement’s origins, profiles of the murdered couples, and accounts of other Tradwife influencers. Gina’s now missing, though, and her wife Jags is increasingly worried. When Jags can’t reach Gina’s editor Helen for help, she begins digging, and a complex, pointed set of revelations unfolds.
Because Tradwife emerges through different formats – the manuscript, emails, podcasts, chat rooms – that unfolding is patiently and deliberately paced, until the dramatic conclusion. Sly as this gradual pacing is, Tradwife doesn’t hedge its bets: with real care and moral clarity, this memorable novel depicts its characters responding as best they can to a world where the right’s relentlessly on the march.
