20 saturday review 1GR Saturday November 14 2020 | the timesMiss Saigon,
the assassin
James Owen picks out his favourites
from this month’s crop of thrillers
Play the Red Queen by Juris Jurjevics
No Exit Press, 320pp; £9.
Saigon, in the autumn of 1963. The Viet-
nam War has yet to fully entangle America.
But a young female assassin is targeting US
military advisers in the city, picking them
off from the back of a speeding scooter.
Sergeant Ellsworth Miser and Sergeant
Clovis Robeson have to stop the sharp-
shooter from adding to her hit list.
They uncover not only corruption that
reaches to the top of the country’s regime,
but a plot to topple it. They also find them-
selves in the sights of the elusive killer,
whose ghoulish signature is to leave be-
hind a red queen playing card.
Published posthumously, this smart,
politically inflected thriller draws on Juris
Jurjevics’s memories of his service in
Vietnam. If its chief merit is his sumptuous
reconstruction of the era’s ambience, it is
also refreshingly nuanced in its depiction
of character — Miser is not above running
scams of his own — while respecting the
rules of the genre. The twist is executed
with a card sharp’s panache.The Searcher by Tana French
Viking, 400pp; £14.
Newly retired, newly divorced Chicago
cop Cal Hooper moves to rural Ireland inwar zone An armoured
personnel carrier being
used as a hearse in
Saigon in 1963the expectation that life will be simpler
among the bogs and mountains. He begins
fixing up a cottage, but old habits die hard
and he can feel trouble gathering. Some-
thing is tearing the throats out of his
neighbours’ sheep and he takes under his
wing a near-feral teenage boy whose
beloved elder brother has disappeared.
Soon Hooper is sticking his nose in where
it’s not wanted, a John Wayne against
whom the locals close ranks.
The theme of the outsider may not be
novel, and the mood one of lowering sus-
pense rather than of taut tension. Yet Tana
French’s study of the compromises made
by small communities is as compelling as
her usual tales of the Dublin murder
squad. The Searcher brings to mind Iain
Banks’s The Crow Road and Leonardo
Sciascia’s mafia classic The Day of the Owl,
and bears comparison to both.The Night of the Fire by Kjell Eriksson,
trans Paul Norlen
Minotaur, 336pp; £21.
Also recently retired and single, Uppsala
cop Ann Lindell moves to rural Sweden inthe belief that life will be quieter among
the pine woods. She begins to make
cheese, and to drink less, but trouble is
stirring in what is an increasingly frac-
tured country. Someone sets fire to a
schoolhouse where immigrants are sleep-
ing. More arson and more murders follow.
What might a band of ultra-nationalists be
planning to do with explosives that have
gone missing? Reluctantly, Lindell begins
to look beneath the surface of her new
friends’ lives, only to find an eviscerated
badger skewered to her bed as a warning.
Kjell Eriksson may not be one of the
more familiar names of Nordic noir, but
this welcome return for Lindell, a decade
after her original series of cases concluded,
is a clear-eyed examination of how the
pettiness of village life mirrors the wider
problems in a changing society. The plot
may have all the acceleration of a Volvo,
but it has the heft of one too.The House by Tom Watson and Imogen
Robertson Sphere, 384pp; £18.
The former Labour deputy leader Tom
Watson teams up with the novelist ImogenRobertson for this political sort-of thriller
which resembles more This Life, the
1990s house-share drama series, than it
emulates House of Cards. The story
switches between the near, post-Covid
future, as a group of former friends reach
power at Westminster, and their younger
selves, whose misdeeds and mistakes will
later risk haunting them. The depiction of
the sacrifices and betrayals required by
politics benefit from an insider’s know-
ledge, and the plot driver of bullying alle-
gations is topical and commendably unex-
pected. That said, readers’ excitement
levels will largely depend on how gripping
they find the nitty-gritty of special advis-
ers’ lives and the ticking time bomb that is
a list of marginal seats. You might think
that the portrayal of the male characters as
weak and conniving, and that of the female
as strong if scheming, perhaps shows
which of the authors did most of the
writing; I couldn’t possibly comment.Kill a Stranger by Simon Kernick
Headline, 384pp; £14.
Matt finds a dead woman in his bed, but it’s
not his pregnant fiancée, Kate. She has
been kidnapped and if he wants her back
alive, he’ll have to do what the title says —
kill a stranger. We’ve all been there, but to
Simon Kernick’s credit he keeps the twists
coming so fast that the improbabilities are
blown away in the slipstream. Gentler
literary qualities come second to the
torrent of cliffhangers and revelations that
soon establish that none of the narrators,
including Kate’s property-developer
tycoon father, is telling the truth. He has
previous, Matt’s a professional actor for
hire and Kate may know more than she
says about her secret sister’s death. Then
there is the nasty, greedy stepbrother and
ex-wife. There’s perhaps a shade too much
dependence on withholding information
from the reader, but that thud you hear is
Kernick whipping the rug from under your
feet again.Book
of the
monthfiction
Thrillers
LARRY BURROWS/THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION VIA GETTY IMAGES; SYMON HAMERbetrayals than a Soviet-esque political
party is probably a university staff
room, and the novel lives up to its name.
There are crossings, double-crossings,
denouncements and defrockings — and
that’s before anyone drags love into
the perilous equation. Collins summons a
Gormenghast-esque richness of place
and people, but while Mervyn Peake’s
imagination feels out of control,
The Betrayals is a perfectly constructed
work of fiction, with audacious twists that
clumsier hands would fumble, and
irresistibly moving emotional beats.
(Collins, left, also writes about sex with realtenderness grounded in character, which
is a rare skill.)
As for the grand jeu itself, it’s a tantalis-
ingly unknowable thing, only defined by
what it isn’t. “It is not music,” the Magister
Ludi tells an audience of eager pupils. “It is
not maths or science or poetry. It is not art.
It is not fiction... You may make
something of all these things that is not a
grand jeu, and equally a grand jeu may
have none of them at all.”
Collins marks her own debt to Hermann
Hesse’s Glass Bead Game for this invention,
but it recalls another grand old man of
European literature: Nabokov called
fiction a “game of worlds”, and Collins
plays her own game here with perfect skill.no more or less. More and less are for
humans.” Then come Léo Martin (and
former Montverre student), the Minister
for Culture who immediately becomes
ex-minister, having blotted an immaculate
record of party loyalty by querying the
sinister-sounding “unity bill”.
His penance is exile to Montverre. “It is
a touching story, the artist returning to his
roots, fulfilling his vocation. Who knows,
it’s possible you will be of use to us there,”
the Chancellor says, dictating Léo’s
resignation for him. The government’s
eagerness to send him there, however, is
not matched by a warm welcome from
everyone at the institution. The Magister
Ludi — who is the only woman in
the all-male school, an amateur
elected to her post by a vaguely ex-
plained shortlist mix-up — is par-
ticularly displeased by Léo’s arrival,
and her animosity seems to be pol-
itical and very personal.
The explanation for that hostility
lies in Léo’s past, which is revealed
through diaries from his time at
Montverre. Through them, we learn
about his own far-from-privileged back-
ground and his passionate rivalry with a
fellow student, Carfax, scion of the noble
de Courcy family — famous for their mas-
tery of the grand jeu, and their tendency
to madness (one of Carfax’s ancestors is
a pyromaniac nicknamed “the lunatic
of London library”). “I am going to be
top of the class this year. I swear it.
Whatever it takes,” young Léo writes.
“And one day, I promise, I am going to
see Carfax de Courcy cry.”
The only environment more fertile forA song of vice and ire
T
here’s a game, but it isn’t a game.
In the world invented by Bridget
Collins for this dizzyingly
wonderful novel, the “grand jeu”
is a national pastime (although
which nation is never stated), practised at
its most refined by a priestly caste of
“magisters”, who also educate the next
generation of players. The university of
the grand jeu is a high, secluded castle
called Montverre — a place of cavernous
halls and mysterious corridors, strange
cries and creeping shadows — where
scholars adopt a life of strict tradition.Outside, an authoritarian government is
scheming to control the grand jeu for its
own vicious purposes.
The Betrayals is Collins’s second novel
for adults after last year’s wildly bestsel-
ling The Binding, and like The Binding it
puts us in the realm of fantasy. Not fan-
tasy in the extravagant world-building
style of, say, George RR Martin (and those
who are tired of waiting for closure on A
Song of Ice and Fire have reason to be
grateful for more moderate imagina-
tions), but a kind of fantasy that
nestles within the familiar — a lit-
tle owed to JK Rowling, who put
magic into the suburbs; a little in
common with Susanna Clarke’s Pi-
ranesi, or (at the twee end of the
scale) the books of Jessie Burton.
Whether or not anything
strictly supernatural hap-
pens in these stories,
there’s a sense of
strangeness and
unlikelihood that
is tantamount to
enchantment.
We see Montverre through four inter-
woven narratives. First we meet the Rat, a
girl who lives furtively in the deserted
reaches of the servants’ quarters, surviving
alone on instinct and suspicion and what
she can take from the kitchens: “Life is
simple for Rats. She does what she has to,Double-crossings
and defrockings are
rife in a fantasy that
lives up to its name,
says Sarah Ditum
The Betrayals
by Bridget CollinsBorough, 425pp;
£14.T
bB
£It is a perfectly
constructed work
of fiction with
audacious twists