The best recent crime and thrillers – review roundup

 

Willism

Crime and thrillers roundup

REVIEW

The best recent crime and thrillers – review roundup

The Predicament by William Boyd; The Killer Question by Janice Hallett; The Impossible Fortune by Richard Osman; 59 Minutes by Holly Seddon; Deadman’s Pool by Kate Rhodes

Laura Wilson
Friday 19 September 2025

The Predicament by William Boyd (Viking, £20)
A second adventure for amateur spy Gabriel Dax, first seen in Boyd’s 2024 novel Gabriel’s Moon. It’s early 1963, and Dax, a travel writer, is in his Sussex cottage working on his latest book, struggling with emotional baggage and yearning for his MI6 handler and sometime girlfriend, Faith Green. She persuades him to go to Guatemala to check out the popular leftwing leader who is threatening to topple the country’s CIA-backed government, but Dax is forced to flee when things go seriously awry. He ends up being sent to West Berlin to gather intelligence on a possible assassin, whose arrival in West Germany just before the visit of US president John F Kennedy may not be coincidental. Beautifully crafted, with echoes of le Carré, Greene and Forsyth, this is a superb evocation of a vanished world, seen through the eyes of a relatably hapless accidental hero.

The Killer Question by Janice Hallett (Viper, £18.99)
Hallett’s latest centres on that staple of British social life, the pub quiz, and like its predecessors it’s told in emails, WhatsApp messages, texts and transcripts. We know from the start that things haven’t gone well for pub landlords Sue and Mal Eastwood: their nephew is pitching a true crime documentary to Netflix, promising “intrigue, tension, betrayal, deception and … murder”. Rewind to five years earlier: Sue and Mal, desperate to keep their struggling business afloat, are pleased at the arrival of a new quiz team. However, the Shadow Knights proceed to sweep the board every week, prompting accusations of cheating. So far, so nerdy – but when the body of someone already outed as a quiz cheat is discovered in a nearby river, things take a darker turn. Some suspension of disbelief is necessary – why Sue and Mal chose to communicate via WhatsApp rather than talking to each other is unclear – but Hallett is a master of misdirection, and this plot is up there with her fiendishly clever best.

The Impossible Fortune by Richard Osman (Viking, £22)
The fifth novel in Osman’s bestselling Thursday Murder Club series sees crime-solving pensioners Elizabeth, Joyce, Ibrahim and Ron engaging with secret codes, drug dealers, impecunious aristocrats and cryptocurrency, with assistance from former cocaine queenpin Connie, friendly cop Donna, Bogdan the handyman and Ron’s clever nine-year-old grandson. Although still grieving for her husband, Elizabeth steps up when Nick, the best man at Joyce’s daughter’s wedding, confides that somebody is trying to kill him. Nick and his business partner Holly own a high-security storage facility and once accepted a payment in bitcoin, the value of which has risen to £350m. They want to cash out, but the money is protected by two codes, and as Nick and Holly have one each, neither can access it alone. When Nick disappears, the quartet gets on the case. The central mystery is a satisfactory head-scratcher, but the true pleasure is a gently humorous read, peopled with characters who feel like old friends.

59 Minutes by Holly Seddon (Orion, £10.99)
Seddon’s seventh novel is a high-concept, inhale-at-a-sitting tour de force. On a Friday afternoon in November, the announcement of an imminent nuclear strike on southern England – just 59 minutes until impact – causes instant chaos. The public are told to seek immediate shelter, but Carrie, stuck in a crowd of panicked commuters at Waterloo station, is desperate to get home to her family. Frankie and Otis, on a romantic minibreak in Devon, are trying to find enough supplies to sustain them until it’s safe to leave their rented cottage, but the queue at the local store soon degenerates into a melee, with worse to follow. As the clock ticks down, Seddon paints a terrifyingly convincing picture of what happens when everything we take for granted breaks down in a matter of seconds, as well as creating characters you’ll be rooting for and keeping up a breakneck pace with a plot that twists, turns, and – without giving too much away – somersaults back on itself.

Deadman’s Pool by Kate Rhodes (Orenda, £9.99)
The eighth novel in Rhodes’s splendid series set on the Isles of Scilly begins when DI Ben Kitto’s dog discovers the remains of an emaciated girl on the uninhabited island of St Helen’s. Kitto and his colleagues are baffled: no one has been reported missing, and rumours about rich islanders being involved in a people-smuggling conspiracy are dismissed as the imaginings of bored schoolkids. Kitto’s narrative is interspersed with that of Mai, a Vietnamese girl who is being held captive in a basement, alone now that her younger sister and her baby – the result of rape by her captor – have been taken away. And when a tiny baby is found abandoned at the police station, the race is on to find the mother before it’s too late. An atmospheric and moving depiction of a tightly knit community in a rugged and often dangerous landscape, Deadman’s Pool is tense and deftly plotted, the pathos fuelling true suspense.

 Mick Herron and Richard Osman: Crime, Comedy and the Art of the Plot On Tuesday 23 September, join Mick Herron, Richard Osman and Alex Clark for an insightful discussion about their new books, Clown Town and The Impossible Fortune, live at Cadogan Hall, London and livestreamed. 

THE GUARDIAN

The Leopard by Jo Nesbø / Review by Laura Wilson

 

The Leopard by Jo Nesbø

BIOGRAPHY

Laura Wilson goes on a Nordic murder spree

Laura Wilson
Saturday 22 January 2011

S

ince The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo was published in 2008, there's been something of a Nordic noir bonanza in this country, with every new Scandinavian crime novel, whether good, bad or indifferent, being engulfed in a blizzard of hyperbole, and every author trailed as "the next Stieg Larsson". While this label is neither intelligent nor helpful, it is probably fair to say that, in terms of both critical and commercial success, Norwegian Jo Nesbø is the writer to whom it is the most applicable.

Jo Nesbø

 

Turn the page

Alfred Hickling, Jane Housham and Laura Wilson on Paper | Hobson's Island | Piano | The Devil's Star

Saturday 19 November 2005

Paper by Bahiyyih Nakhjavani (Bloomsbury, £7.99)

One of the weirdest instances of grave robbing occurred in the mid-19th century, when Egyptian mummies were exported to America so that the rags could be pulped in the paper mills of Maine. The Persian writer Bahiyyih Nakhjavani includes this among reams of fascinating paper-related facts (interesting to note that the very first paper mill was established in Baghdad in 793) in a poetic account of a Persian scribe's quest to find the perfect sheaf. Nakhjavani's dream-like fable is peopled with a drifting cast of mullahs, moneylenders, envoys and emperors. The frequent passages of paper-fetishism have a fleeting, musical sensuality without ultimately making very much sense: "Each sheet was impeccably trimmed, and as wide as a hand span of hope. Each page was no longer than belief and as cool as the human soul." But as the use of print becomes increasingly prevalent, the scribe finds there's a declining market for exquisite calligraphy inscribed with a sharpened thumbnail: "As the scribal bonds between books and men began to break, Persia became paperless." Wasn't that supposed to have happened in offices about 10 years ago?

Alfred Hickling

Five of the best crime and thrillers of 2021

 

Final novels from John le Carré and Andrea Camilleri, dark psychological debut Girl A and more

Laura Wilson
Thusday 2 December 2021

 

Silverview

John le Carré (Viking)

Le Carré’s final complete novel was published in October, in the week of what would have been his 90th birthday. Having made his fortune, Julian Lawndsley has left the City to run a bookshop in East Anglia, where a meeting with an eccentric Polish émigré and former spy draws him into a web of intrigue. The cast of characters, including several husband-and-wife spy pairings, are compromised by secrets, loyalties and allegiances both professional and familial, and no one, least of all the Service itself, is innocent. Valedictory, with a final turn of events that ends surprisingly but pleasingly in a cock-up, this is a satisfying coda to the career of the finest thriller writer of the 20th century.

Riccardino

Andrea Camilleri, translated by Stephen Sartarelli (Mantle)

Written in 2005, Camilleri’s final Inspector Montalbano novel was kept in a safe for publication after the author’s death, which occurred in 2019. Like its much loved predecessors, Riccardino is set in the fictional Sicilian town of Vigata, but this time the increasingly tired and tetchy detective is joined by the author himself, who makes ever more far-fetched suggestions as to how the investigation into the death of the titular character should proceed. The absurdity mounts as the Catholic church persists in sticking its Jesuitical oar in and the revelations about the dead man’s private life grow ever more colourful. This novel is a fittingly exuberant last outing.

The First Day of Spring

Nancy Tucker (Hutchinson)

“I killed a little boy today …” From the first line of this assured debut, we know that eight-year-old Chrissie is a murderer. Neglected by her parents to the point of starvation, she is desperate for both physical and emotional nourishment, and her every action – bullying her classmates, making trouble at school, and finally strangling two-year-old Steven – is a heartbreaking attempt to make somebody notice her existence. The narrative is split between the child Chrissie and the adult she becomes, released from a secure unit and renamed Julia, now with a child of her own. Tucker explores the difficult subjects of cruelty, guilt and redemption with compassion and extraordinary finesse, in a way that will resonate long after the final page.

Girl A

Abigail Dean (Harper Collins)

Another superb first novel that is all the more powerful for being unsensational, Girl A is the story of Lex, the eldest daughter of a religious fanatic who, enabled by his wife, abused his children so appallingly that the family home became known as the “house of horrors”. Many years later, Lex, now a lawyer in New York, is compelled to relive the past; she returns to England to oversee the house’s conversion to a community centre and is forced into contact with her siblings, all of whom have reacted to their childhood experiences in markedly different ways. One of the best depictions I have read of the difficulties of “moving on” and the impossibility of explanations to outsiders, this book is haunting and powerful, with a hard-won hope.

Winter Counts

David Heska Wanbli Weiden (Simon & Schuster)

Vigilante-for-hire Virgil Wounded Horse acts on behalf of those on the Rosebud Native American Reservation in South Dakota who have been failed by both the toothless tribal police and a foot-dragging US criminal justice system. After his teenage nephew almost dies from a heroin overdose, Virgil is determined to take on the men responsible for bringing the drug into the community. However, with limited authority and some powerful adversaries, his life is becoming both complicated and very dangerous. In his debut novel, Weiden, a member of the Sicangu Lakota Nation, gives a fascinating insight into an often overlooked world, and draws the reader into a satisfying mystery.

THE GUARDIAN