The best recent thrillers – review roundup
The Memory Wood
Sam Lloyd
Bantam Press, £12.99, pp384
Elissa Mirzoyan is 13. She has been kidnapped from outside the chess tournament she was competing in, and is being kept in a cellar beneath the woods. Here she is found by Elijah, 12, who has always lived in the woods. He’s never had a proper friend, and now that he’s stumbled upon Elissa, he’s reluctant to let her go. There’s a nightmarish, fairytale quality to Sam Lloyd’s debut thriller, which switches between timelines and perspectives: the horrors Elissa’s mother is going through; the strange life Elijah leads; the brilliantly sharp mind of Elissa as she weighs up her options for escape. And then, painfully and honestly, there’s the world of DS Mairead MacCullagh, who might be exactly the right woman for the job, but is also trying to ignore the miscarriage she might be in the middle of. The dreamy nature of the story slowly dissipates as the danger deepens, leaving this reader with pounding heart and sweating palms.
The Guest List
Lucy Foley
HarperCollins, £12.99, pp384
Lucy Foley’s first thriller, The Hunting Party, told the story of a party of old friends snowed in at a Highland lodge when a murder occurs. It was a huge bestseller. Her second follows a similar formula – this time, it’s a wedding on a remote Irish island, where the friends are trapped by a storm. The body is, again, discovered early on, and Foley’s narrative again flits between alternative points of view: Jules, the perfectionist bride trying not to think about the mysterious note she received; the celebrity groom and his old school friends who went to the sort of horrific boarding school where “only the strong survived”; the wedding planner who thinks, “terrible things happen, I learned that while I was still a child”. Everyone appears to have a motive and a dark tragic secret in their past, and the mounting sense of doom is piled on pretty thick. It’s bound to be another hit.
The Holdout
Graham Moore
Orion, £12.99, pp336
Maya Seale is a brilliant defence attorney. We meet her successfully defending a woman who has cut her abusive husband’s head off with a pair of gardening shears. But this has nothing to do with anything: Maya, it turns out, is a notorious woman herself. Notorious because 10 years earlier, she was part of the jury ruling on the disappearance of 15-year-old heiress Jessica Silver, who vanished on the way home from school. Maya managed to convince her fellow jurors that there was not enough evidence to convict Jessica’s teacher, Bobby Nock, of the crime, and he was judged not guilty – to the rage of Jessica’s parents, who all believe he did it, and the rest of the world. Now a podcast is planning a docuseries about the old case, and Maya’s been reluctantly ordered to get involved. Then one of the jury members winds up dead, and she becomes the prime suspect. Written in snappy chapters, and short, bullish sentences, this is a lot of (silly, gripping) fun.
Firewatching
Russ Thomas
Simon & Schuster, £12.99, pp432
DS Adam Tyler makes his debut in Russ Thomas’s debut novel. Sidelined to the cold case review unit in Sheffield, Tyler manages to finagle his way on to a current case when a corpse is discovered bricked into a room – “probably alive when he went in” – in a house that has been destroyed by fire. As Tyler investigates, dealing with latent and not-so-latent homophobia among his colleagues, more fires start springing up, and the cold case suddenly isn’t quite so cold any more. An intriguing start to a new series, introducing a pleasingly misanthropic new hero with the requisite traumatic past.
To order The Memory Wood, The Guest List, The Holdout or Firewatching go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15
