• The Last Dance, by Mark Billingham (Atlantic Monthly):
Mark Billingham knows a thing or two about murder, as well he might after 22 years spent writing Tom Thorne police procedurals.
Specifically, he knows what many other authors often forget: For every murder victim, there’s doubtless a grieving relative in need of comfort left behind.Perhaps not many real-life police would wrap their arms around a despairing widow and assure her that one day things will feel better. But when Blackpool Detective Sergeant Declan Miller—Billingham’s new protagonist in The Last Dance—does, only a cold-hearted, cynical reader could fail to feel a lump in their throat. Miller’s tender-heartedness is understandable. We meet him as he returns to work early from compassionate leave, following the shooting death of his police inspector wife (and amateur ballroom dancing partner), Alex. Partly, Miller wants to keep an eye on detectives looking into her death, but mostly he just needs a distraction from his grief.
He’s assigned a new police partner, heavy metal music fan DS Sara Xiu, as well as a double murder in need of attention. Two seemingly unconnected guests have been found dead in adjoining rooms at the Sands Hotel. Miller knows instinctively that if he can find a link between those victims, he’ll be well on the way to solving this labyrinthine mystery. The case intrigues him, even more so when he discovers one of the deceased is the son of a crime boss Alex had been investigating at the time she died. Evidence suggests these crimes were the result of a bungled contract hit-job.
Don’t be misled into thinking that a novel about a grieving detective is going to be a thoroughgoing sob-fest. Yes, as Miller reunites with members of the dancing group (mostly ex-cops) to which he and his wife belonged, tears are shed. But one of this detective’s mechanisms for coping with his lingering pain is making wisecracks wherever possible. That plays well to Billingham’s background as a former stand-up comedian. The jokes start right off the bat, as he comments on his story’s setting: the rundown British seaside resort of Blackpool.
“To the casual observer,” he writes, “this might be Las Vegas.
“If that casual observer really squinted.
“And had never been to Las Vegas.”
The author’s enjoyment at introducing a fresh detective series after all those Tom Thorne novels is infectious.
• Ozark Dogs, by Eli Cranor (Soho Crime):
Noir fiction is said to flourish whenever faith in society and its institutions is at a particularly low ebb. In tough times, the argument goes, readers take refuge in stories that show how things could actually be far worse than they are. Perhaps that’s why cracking yarns by S.A. Cosby, Dennis Lehane, Jordan Harper, and Eli Cranor have all drawn favorable responses this year.
Cranor’s second novel (after 2022’s Edgar Award-winning Don’t Know Tough) presents us with two warring rural Arkansas families, the Ledfords and the Fitzjurls. Their feud goes back a generation, to when junkyard owner Jeremiah Fitzjurls’s son, Tommy, was convicted for the brutal slaying of Bunn Ledford’s eldest boy, Rudnick.
Bunn, a methamphetamine dealer by trade, has benefited from the meth epidemic that’s become such a scourge across rural America. He made his own product until his ramshackle drugs lab literally blew up in his face, leaving him both horribly disfigured and with no way to continue earning an income. It’s his second son, a white supremacist skinhead named Evail, who finally comes up with a desperate new moneymaking stratagem. Instead of manufacturing their own meth, they’ll purchase it from a Mexican drugs cartel over the border. When the Ledfords find themselves short of cash to embark on this enterprise, Evail offers to kidnap white teenage girls and trade them as sex slaves to pay for the drugs.
Bunn sees this as a fine opportunity to wreak some revenge on Jeremiah Fitzjurls, a loner and Vietnam War veteran who’s been struggling to bring up his 17-year-old granddaughter, Jo, ever since her father, Tommy, was sent to prison. But Jeremiah’s temperamentally unsuited to that role,
and his overprotectiveness is driving her to find brand-new ways to misbehave. Evail intends to take advantage of her freedom by snatching her as his first victim to swap for 50 pounds of Mexican meth.This is as black a noir yarn as you’ll find, and Cranor maintains an admirably relentless pace throughout his telling of it. He even saves the story’s most startling plot twist to puncture the only light element in these pages—the love story between Jo and her quarterback boyfriend, Colt Dillard (another Ledford relation, though she doesn’t know that), to whom she plans to lose her virginity on high school prom night.
Any romantics among this novel’s readers might want to skip that particular revelation.
• Past Lying, by Val McDermid (Atlantic Monthly):
Teasingly, Val McDermid opens her seventh and latest Detective Chief Inspector Karen Pirie novel with a Raymond Chandler quote: “The perfect detective story cannot be written.” Might she be setting out to prove the great man wrong?
One of Past Lying’s principal players, bestselling Tartan noir crime-fictionist Jake Stein, believes the perfect crime story must contain the perfect murder. Following Stein’s untimely demise due to a brain aneurysm, his papers are bequeathed to the National Library of Scotland. Among those is a fragment of a novel-in-progress in which a character claims to have devised the perfect murder—and then gone on to kill someone in order to test whether his theory would stand up. The victim sounds worryingly similar to Lara Hardie, an Edinburgh University student whose disappearance in the previous year has not yet been solved by police.
McDermid’s tale is set in April 2020, in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when Scotland imposed rigorous lockdown conditions to halt the virus’ spread. As a consequence of those, Pirie and her team are only allowed to interview witnesses from a distance of two meters (six feet five inches)—or, to paraphrase McDermid, approximately the length of two German Shepherds or one Richard Osman.
(The exceptionally tall author of the Thursday Murder Club novels is just one real-life figure McDermid mentions as she writes gleefully about the world of mystery thrillers.)When Lara Hardie’s body turns up exactly where Stein’s unpublished book said it would be, Pirie has to decide whether the case can really be that simply solved. “It’s a three-layer problem,” declares her sergeant, Daisy Mortimer, producing a massive box of chocolates. The two detectives munch salted pralines, treacle toffees, nut clusters, pisco sours, and mint cracknels as they sift through the evidence. By the time Pirie grabs the last chocolate ginger, she’s worked out the answer.
Past Lying may not be the perfect crime story, but it’s one of the best this year and likely the greatest we’ll see set during the pandemic.
• Red Queen, by Juan Gómez-Jurado (Minotaur):
When the near-transparent corpse of a teenage boy is found in the home of Spain’s most prominent banker, the newly formed investigative team of civilian Antonia Scott and Inspector Jon Gutiérrez are brought in to catch the killer. The boy suffered a slow and painful death, with all the blood drained from his body.
That macabre killing, we learn, was the result of an abduction gone wrong carried out by a figure called Ezekiel, who has now claimed another victim—a textile tycoon’s daughter. Can Scott and Gutiérrez rescue her before Ezekiel takes another life?
Those mismatched partners in crime-solving are employed by a secret pan-European agency tasked with stopping the sort of major crimes that would spread panic across the continent if they became public knowledge. Scott’s a half-English/half-Spanish bona fide
genius with an IQ of 242, the highest in Spain—and possibly in the world. (Older readers may compare her to American TV sleuth Adrian Monk, though Monk was never pitted against an opponent as nightmarishly cruel and disturbing as Ezekiel.) Gutiérrez, meanwhile, is a gay, food-loving, and corrupt cop who was caught red-handed planting evidence on a suspect. He’s been told that the only way he can escape incarceration is to work as Scott’s minder. He readily agrees, knowing that maintaining his freedom will allow him to continue consuming his mother’s delectable cod cheeks. As we read about Gutiérrez struggling to climb stairs, though, it’s hard not to wonder whether an enforced spell away from his mother’s home-cooking might actually do him good.Red Queen is a stylish thriller, the first novel in a trilogy by journalist and author Gómez-Jurado, which between them in their original Spanish language versions have already sold more than 2 million copies. The English translation of the second entry, Black Wolf, is due out on both sides of the Atlantic in March 2024.
• Dead of Night, by Simon Scarrow (Kensington):
The ghost of Nazi chieftain Heinrich Himmler hovers ominously over this second World War II-era thriller starring Criminal Inspector Horst Schenke of Berlin’s Kriminalpolizei, or Kripo. It’s the early days of 1940. Schenke and his detectives are diligently dealing with the latest scams perpetrated by their city’s criminal element, while slowly becoming aware of the far greater atrocities being carried out in their name across Europe by Adolf Hitler’s government. All the while, they’re watched over by Himmler—a complete madman, as history records it, yet put in charge of maintaining German law and order—who keeps a close watch on Kripo activity via his deputy, Reinhard Heydrich.
Dead of Night is a fictionalized account of how the Aktion T4 eugenics program—a classified policy of Hitler and his henchmen to murder mentally and physically disabled children before there was a chance their blood
might “contaminate” the Aryan gene pool—ultimately came to light. Even the Nazis, it seems, were worried at first that their monstrous plan to do away with innocent children might cause sufficient outrage to prompt an uprising.In this novel, Schenke risks the wrath of Himmler and Heydrich by ignoring an instruction not to investigate the death of a doctor, and then looking into what happened to one of the early young patients sent for treatment in an Aktion T4 healthcare facility. Scarrow’s prose is admirably terse, allowing the full horror of the evidence Schenke uncovers to speak for itself. This is a terrifying story but an important and chilling reminder, if one be needed, of the evil ideology that lay behind the fascist policies that once held sway in Germany.
Scarrow’s previous Horst Schenke novel, Blackout, was released in 2021. An as-yet-untitled third installment in the series is set for publication in Great Britain this coming June. UPDATE: The release of that third novel has been postponed until March 2025.
Other 2023 Favorites: Small Mercies, by Dennis Lehane (Harper); All the Sinners Bleed, by S.A. Cosby (Flatiron); The Secret Hours, by Mick Herron (Soho Crime); Scorched Grace, by Margot Douaihy (Gillian Flynn); and City of Dreams, by Don Winslow (Morrow).
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