It’s probably an awkward feeling to win an award named after your father (the Bloody Scotland McIlvanney Prize for Scottish Crime Book of the Year), but Liam McIlvanney can be proud of carrying on a family tradition in the Bible John-inspired The Quaker (HarperCollins, £12.99). Fifteen months after three murders, the police are stumped, so DI Duncan McCormack is brought on to the case. An interesting, thoughtful sleuth trying to discern a pattern in the murders, he’s resented by the CID for professional and sectarian reasons. A slice of old-fashioned policing, with all the twists you could want, the novel opens out to give a broader view of late-1960s Glasgow as its old landscape is fast disappearing.
Deriving much of its impact from the way women’s testimonies are often dismissed, A.J. Finn’s The Woman in the Window (HarperCollins, £12.99) abounds in misdirection, red herrings and Hitchcock references. Traumatised, agoraphobic Anna Fox hasn’t left her Harlem brownstone for ten months, her life mainly consisting of spying on neighbours, high on medication and alcohol. Seeing what appears to be a murder across the street, she tells the police. They don’t believe her, and she begins to doubt herself too. With an unreliable narrator keeping readers guessing, this psychological thriller is strong on character and long on suspense.
In Tombland (Mantle, £20), the seventh of C.J. Sansom’s Shardlake series of historical whodunnits, we’ve reached 1549 and hunchbacked lawyer Shardlake is working for the future Elizabeth I, who sends him to Norwich to examine the case of her relative John Boleyn, charged with murdering his estranged wife. However, rebellious peasants are poised to sweep into Norwich, and Shardlake has to decide which side he’s on. The politics threaten to overshadow the Boleyn plot, but, even in a meticulous recreation of Tudor England worthy of Hilary Mantel, Sansom never loses sight of it.
Ruth Ware gives old tropes a good polish for The Death of Mrs Westaway (Harvill Secker, £12.99), in which a letter informs Harriet Westaway of an inheritance from her Cornish grandmother. The letter has obviously been sent to the wrong person, but Harriet is desperately in debt and thinks that the cold-reading skills she learned as a fortune teller might help her pass as the real beneficiary. By the time Harriet suspects something is amiss, she is committed to seeing the game through to the end. It’s clearly inspired by Daphne du Maurier, with a discernible Agatha Christie influence, but Ware make her novel feel both contemporary and pleasantly retro.
Sherlock Holmes is reborn yet again in the shape of the awesomely intelligent Isaiah Quintabe from South Central LA in Joe Ide’s Righteous (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £14.99). The second of Ide’s novels about the aptly-named IQ sees him hired by his late brother’s fiancée to bail out her gambling addict sister. But Janine hasn’t just picked up gambling debts, she’s stolen secrets from her gangster father too, and IQ has to draw on his experience of both sides of the law to find a solution. Pairing Holmesian deduction with gun-toting action, Righteous bristles with electric prose and live-wire dialogue.
ALASTAIR MABBOTT
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