Sunday Magazine – July 28, 2019

52 S MAGAZINE ★ 28 JULY 2019

Charlot te

Heathcote

The Sleepwalker

by Joseph Knox

(Doubleday, £12.99)

DC Aidan Waits is the

bad-boy Manchester cop who

makes every other maverick

fictional policeman look like

Dixon Of Dock Green.

Joseph Knox’s third novel

sees Aidan guarding a notorious killer who lies

dying in hospital, and hoping he will finally

reveal the whereabouts of his last victim.

Then a horrific attack leaves both the killer

and another police officer dead and Aidan is,

as ever, beset on all sides by bullies and

blackmailers as he seeks the truth.

A storyline about Aidan reconnecting with his

estranged family adds emotional depth to a

book that is unrepentantly, invigoratingly dark.

The July Girls

by Phoebe Locke

(Wildfire, £18.99)

Phoebe Locke’s second

psychological thriller,

following last year’s The

Tall Man, begins with Addie,

the narrator, looking back at

her 10th birthday on July 7,

2005. This was the day of the 7/7 London
      bombings and when Addie’s dodgy and usually
      absent father returned to the family home
      covered in blood, she thought he’d been
      caught up in the atrocity. But there may be
      another explanation.
      Unfolding against the backdrop of a turbulent
      decade for London, the novel follows the
      fortunes of Addie and Jessie, the older sister
      who has raised her virtually single-handedly.
      They become mixed up with a serial killer,
      dubbed “Magpie” by the press, who snatches
      a woman off the streets on the same date in
      July every year.
      This is a domestic suspense story that
      happily looks beyond the usual middle-class
      milieu of the genre, combining thrills with
      unusually strong characterisation and mordant
      insight into broken Britain.

A Killing Sin

by KH Irvine

(Urbane, £8.99)

This debut novel, which the

author wrote as a 50th

birthday present to herself,

is so ambitious that it

might have taxed the most

experienced of authors. But

To die for

Sift the clues in Jake Kerridge’s pick

of gripping new crime thrillers

Knife

by Jo Nesbo

(Harvill Secker, £20)

The 12th entry in the

Harry Hole series sees

Jo Nesbo’s intense

inspector win the lottery

and embark on a contented

retirement. Only joking. Jo

Nesbo says of this book, “I’ve been brutal to

Harry before but never this brutal.”

The writer has surpassed his own dark

standards with his repulsive villain, Svein

Finne, who rapes women in order to populate

the world with his children. The ever-luckless

Harry, who is so obsessed with Finne that his

marriage has broken down and he is back on

the bottle, wakes up hazy after a bender to

find himself under suspicion of committing

a terrible crime.

There has always been something

joyously mad about these novels but

this latest, in which Jo Nesbo

pursues so many storylines,

themes and obsessions that the

book can barely contain them, is positively

manic. It’s tiresome at times, but that’s a small

price to pay to enjoy his unique, deliciously

horrible vision of the world once again.

Lady In The Lake

by Laura Lippman

(Faber, £12.99)

One of the many wonderful

things about Laura

Lippman’s novels is that

you’re never sure what you’re

going to get – apart from

consummate storytelling.

Her latest is the tale of Maddie Schwartz,

a Jewish socialite in 1960s Baltimore who is

stifled by her marriage. So she leaves her

husband and embarks on an exciting new life,

trying to break into journalism and enjoying a

relationship with a black policeman.

She hopes to make her name with an

investigation into the death of an African-

American woman in whom nobody is taking

much interest. In an intriguing twist, some

chapters are told from the perspective of the

dead woman, commenting none too happily

from the afterlife on Maddie’s activities. This is

a crime story told in an unusual way but just as

much a page-turner as the conventional kind.