• Billy Summers, by Stephen King (Scribner):
They say the late Mickey Spillane once declared: “Nobody reads a book to get to the middle.” It’s easy to imagine Stephen King tapping out Billy Summers and thinking: “I’ll show you a middle, Spillane, that people’ll wanna read.” The Billy Summers of the title is a hit man hoping to draw one final big payday before getting out of the game.
He has his tender, sympathetic side—but his soul was blackened as a child by witnessing his little sister battered to death. (If you were casting this as a movie, with a former big-screen Stephen King protagonist as Billy, you’d pick Jack Nicholson rather than Tom Hanks.) King teases his readers by having Billy recognize that things always go wrong in these sorts of one-last-job stories. When that inevitability happens is when we reach the plot’s mid-point. Billy is hiding from a crime boss, who’s decided to kill him rather than pay up, when he spots a gang-rape victim being dumped in the street. The pace of this novel changes dramatically in an interlude during which Billy rescues the girl, Alice, and then nurses her back to health before wreaking a particularly apposite revenge on her attackers in an eye-watering scene that features a kitchen food mixer. After that, it’s back to the main plot, with Alice and Billy now working together. Stephen King’s 74 years old now. This spectacular return to form will, one hopes, banish any ideas the author might have of getting out of the game himself. After all, as Billy could tell him, retirement plans rarely go well.• Lightseekers, by Femi Kayode (Mulholland):
Investigative psychologist Dr. Philip Taiwo, the hero of Femi Kayode’s breathtaking debut thriller, Lightseekers, is an engagingly complex man: scuttling away to look into three murders on a remote Nigerian university campus, rather than stay home and confront his wife with his suspicions that she’s having an affair. I know little of Nigerian men. Or women. Perhaps he’s not atypical. Maybe running away to avoid difficult conversations with their spouses is something all West African husbands do.
All I’m saying is that Mrs. Taiwo must be some formidable lady, if her husband would face a bunch of campus killers before he’d face her. Particularly these campus killers, who are nothing like the cerebral, genteel villains of Colin Dexter’s town-and-gown Inspector Morse mysteries. The terrifying figures in Lightseekers rank among the most vicious crime-fiction murderers of this, or any, year. There’s a whole mob of them, too, and they strip, beat, stone, and triumphantly parade their undergraduate victims through the streets before draping their necks with car tires doused in petrol, which they then set alight. In the same way that Kayode doesn’t flinch from describing these “necklacings” in gruesome detail, Dr. Taiwo—no matter how timid he is on the home front—fearlessly investigates the murders, despite the risk of provoking a similar fate for himself. Kayode’s the latest exponent of Nigerian noir to break through in the wake of Oyinkan Braithwaite’s 2018 worldwide hit, My Sister, the Serial Killer. Braithwaite’s been quick to champion him, describing Lightseekers as “ripe with all the twists and turns you could hope for.” She’s not wrong.• Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, by Quentin Tarantino (Harper):
It takes only one whip-smart exchange of culturally referenced dialogue in filmmaker Quentin Tarantino’s darkly comic debut novel, set amid the 1960s Manson family killing spree, to gladden the heart that he’s now writing novels, too. It comes when Cliff, an old-school movie stuntman, picks up a teenage hippie hitchhiker, Pussycat. After first mocking him for buying a Tom Jones album on 8-track cartridge, the girl plays it anyway—shimmying in her car seat, while removing her cut-off Levi’s and “the pink panties with little cherries printed on them” that she’s wearing underneath. Like a cross between a UN peacekeeper and a professor of modern literature, only with more eye-catching underwear, she then explains to an amused Cliff how their incompatible musical tastes just don’t matter:
“Mark Twain said, ‘If people didn’t have different opinions, there’d be no such thing as horse races.’”By that point in the story I was too engaged in the plot to stop and check whether Pussycat had made up the quote. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is based on Tarantino’s own 2019 film of the same name, which, like the best of his movies, had a retro feel. The book does as well, though Tarantino’s prose style echoes a wholly different era. It unexpectedly draws from Douglas Coupland’s early ’90s Generation X mode of anecdote-laden storytelling, which makes it refreshingly different from any other crime writing today.
He asks, “Is that what Mark Twain said?”
She shrugs. “Somethin’ like that.”
Oh, and that Mark Twain quote? Turns out Pussycat was pretty much right. It comes from Pudd’nhead Wilson.• Slough House, by Mick Herron
(Soho Crime):
Gleefully looking forward to new books featuring the latest exploits of favorite characters is like writing to Santa and expecting to wake on Christmas morning to a stocking full of goodies at the foot of one’s bed. When you’re a grown-up, you shouldn’t still be doing it—not least because you’re setting yourself up for potential disappointment. However, during yet another COVID-19-blighted year, fictional figures became the only old friends we could legally have in the house under the strictest lockdown conditions. Not that the protagonists of the three novels I most looked forward to reading this year were the sort that any sane person would willingly invite across their threshold. All of them—Elliot Rook, the devious and unprincipled lawyer created by Gary Bell; the grumpy dinosaur of a BBC hack, William Carver, who was brought to life by Peter Hanington; and above all, Mick Herron’s foul-mouthed and even more foul-smelling spy boss Jackson Lamb—are monsters. But monsters who light up the pages of the stories they grace. Thankfully, neither Bell’s Post Mortem nor Hanington’s A Cursed Place disappointed. And Herron’s Slough House (the seventh novel in this series) is possibly the best outing yet for Lamb. Herron’s main character may be larger than life, but his plots are grounded in reality. The Britain he portrays is ruled by a prime minister mercilessly described as “a cross between a game-show host and a cartoon yeti,” and Russian agents are running amok in it, believing they can commit murder at will with impunity. Lamb’s all we have to save us.
• Under Color of Law, by Aaron Philip Clark (Thomas & Mercer):
You can pick up bad habits from reading crime novels. Theft, though, shouldn’t be one of them. I want to describe Aaron Philip Clark’s latest as a “ripped-from-the-headlines police procedural.” But I can’t, without stealing from Lesa Holstine, who got there first by using the phrase in an incisive review for the esteemed U.S. publication Library Journal. Although the incident that kicks off Clark’s plot—the racially motivated police killing of a suspect
for “resisting arrest”—is set in Los Angeles in 2010, it has obvious parallels with last year’s real-life murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, which sparked the global Black Lives Matter protests. Clark’s protagonist, the unimaginatively nicknamed “Finn” Finnegan, is a Black LAPD recruit fast-tracked to detective grade as a reward for not intervening, and later keeping his mouth shut, when two colleagues brutalize and kill a suspect—one with the same skin color as Finn—because he swore at them after they asked him to give his name. Years later, Finnegan is investigating the death of another Black victim, possibly also killed by racist police officers. This time he’s determined to seek justice for the deceased, no matter what it costs. Under Color of Law is a shocking indictment of racism and corruption in a big-city police force. But that doesn’t mean it’s preeningly self-righteous. Or preachy. Thinking that would be doing a massive injustice to an adrenaline-fueled noir thriller that grips you like a rabid wolverine from the opening page and never lets go.Other 2021 Favorites: Northern Spy, by Flynn Berry (Viking); Five Decembers, by James Kestrel (Hard Case Crime); 1979, by Val McDermid (Atlantic Monthly Press); True Crime Story, by Joseph Knox (Sourcebooks Landmark); and Never Saw Me Coming, by Vera Kurian (Park Row).
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