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The best recent crime and thrillers – review roundup

<span>Photograph: Stan Prucha/Alamy</span>
Photograph: Stan Prucha/Alamy

Booker-winning novelist John Banville has ditched nom de crime Benjamin Black for his latest whodunnit, Snow (Faber, £14.99), and replaced his series character, the pathologist Quirke, with detective St John Strafford. The temporal and geographic location remains the same – Ireland in the 1950s – with a touch of Agatha Christie as a body is discovered in the library of a Protestant Wexford landowner. Father Tom Lawless has been stabbed and castrated. By the time the detective arrives, the scene has been tidied up by the housekeeper, Mrs Duffy, who has “the look of a character actor”; also deliberately drawn from central casting are her employer Colonel Osborne, his considerably younger and heavily medicated second wife, his wayward teenage daughter and hostile medical student son, the stable boy, the doctor, the neighbour and the staff at the local inn. Nobody is telling the truth and the snow that prevented the priest from returning home after dinner blankets the landscape, hiding secrets and muffling sound, much like the chilly, authoritarian hand of the all-powerful Catholic church, which – in the person of the Archbishop of Dublin – insists that the death is reported as an accident. It isn’t, of course, and the stable lad’s description of the deceased as “friendly” soon shows us where this story is going … Short on surprises, then, but with plenty of atmosphere and an appealing new investigator.

A coming-of-age story as much as an espionage novel, Charles Cumming’s Box 88 (HarperCollins, £14.99) is the tale of Lachlan Kite, recruited by a teacher at a lightly fictionalised version of Eton to spy on behalf of the titular agency, a super-secret organisation embedded in the UK and US intelligence network. Accompanying his schoolfriend Xavier Bonnard to France in 1989, Kite must gather information about one of the family’s houseguests, an Iranian businessman who may have been involved in the Lockerbie bombing. The narrative shifts between the events of this holiday and the (Covid-less) present day, when Kite is abducted from Bonnard’s funeral by Iranian intelligence, who threaten to kill his pregnant wife if he doesn’t reveal the truth about what took place 30 years earlier. There’s plenty of cloak-and-dagger action here, and the requisite number of twists and turns, but it’s the characterisation that makes this exploration of friendships, familial relations and betrayal a stand-out read.

Boyhood allegiance and family troubles also drive the plot of American author John Vercher’s first novel. Set in Pittsburgh in 1995, Three-Fifths (Pushkin Vertigo, £12.99) is the story of 22-year-old waiter Bobby Saraceno, whose life is turned upside down by the return of his former best friend after a three-year prison sentence for drug dealing. Aaron, who forbade Bobby’s visits, now sports Aryan Brotherhood tattoos, a shaven head and a pumped-up physique; after a hostile encounter in a fast food outlet, he beats a young black man unconscious with a brick. Bobby, whose conflicted loyalties are exacerbated by the fact that he keeps his mixed-race identity secret, is further confused when he meets the father he’d been told was dead, but who turns out to be treating Aaron’s victim. Despite an over-reliance on coincidences, Three-Fifths is compelling and powerfully moving.

Equally gripping is the debut thriller from historical romance author Alyssa Cole. When No One Is Watching (William Morrow, £8.99) is set in Brooklyn, where the gentrification of a neglected neighbourhood is taking a sinister turn. Sydney Green, born and brought up in Gifford Place, is angered by a walking tour guide who details the lives of the rich white people who lived there a hundred years ago but neglects to mention the less affluent black residents of more recent decades. As she begins research for a tour of her own, she hears rumours that the place is being considered as the location for a pharmaceutical company’s new HQ and notices that longtime neighbours are starting to disappear and small businesses being squeezed out as the white middle class moves in. Myriad microaggressions, interspersed with snippy excerpts from social media platform “OurHood” (which will be wincingly familiar to anyone who is on the NextDoor network), escalate out of control as Sydney gets threatening phone calls and starts to hear noises in the walls. Cole expertly ratchets up the tension as this tale of systemic racism, rampant capitalism and the concomitant exploitation of the poor and disadvantaged becomes increasingly and terrifyingly macabre.

Lastly, a murder takes place in what must be the apogee of smart addresses: Windsor Castle is the setting for the first in a new series by SJ Bennett, The Windsor Knot (Zaffre, £12.99), in which the Queen solves mysteries. On the morning after her 90th birthday celebrations in 2016, one of the guests is found dead in his room, and, when the servants come under suspicion, Elizabeth II takes matters into her own hands. This version of Her Majesty – shrewd, sensible and inquisitive – has much in common with Alan Bennett’s royal creation in The Uncommon Reader, and the resulting book, with its mixture of real and imagined characters, is charming, cosy and respectful.