booksbooks
Louisiana as the 20th
anniversary of her father’s
killing spree approaches.
Impelled by a theory of the
copycat killer’s identity, and
aware that if she’s right her
own life is in danger, she
sets out to track him down.
As Chloe’s mind moves
restlessly between her
traumatic past and nightmare
present, her inner voice —
candid, intelligent, vividly
evocative, details-obsessed,
but prone to error — is
superbly rendered. The
psychological thriller genre
may be exhausted and ailing,
but it’s not quite moribund yet
when there are debuts as well
plotted and written as this.
Just like John le Carré’s
The Spy Who Came in from the
Cold, Joseph Kanon’s The
Berlin Exchange (Simon &
Schuster £16.99) is set in
east Berlin in 1963, but the
spook at its centre is very
different from Alec Leamas. A
physicist, Martin was jailed in
Britain for leaking atom-bomb
secrets to Russia, and has
agreed to go to East Germany
not for political reasons but
to see his ex-wife Sabine, now
married to a creepy lawyer,
and his son Peter. If you take
on le Carré’s best novel so
directly, you really need
to produce a matching
masterpiece, and The Berlin
Exchange isn’t that. What it is,
though, is an enjoyable blend
of atmospherics, doomed
love story and Cold War
derring-do, which cleverly
finds its own way of bringing
an agent in from the cold.
Andy, in Linwood
Barclay’s Take Your Breath
Away (HQ £20), is still
reconstructing his shattered
life six years after his wife
Brie went missing — he has
moved away to another part
of Connecticut and is in a
new relationship. Then he
hears of possible sightings
of Brie in the town where
they lived, compelling him
to reinvestigate her
disappearance. After the
more thematically ambitious
Find You First, published last
year, this is a back-to-basics
thriller exhibiting Barclay’s
remarkable strengths in
plotting and characterisation.
Perhaps only John Grisham is
his equal in creating show-
stealing supporting characters.The psychological thriller is back
THRILLERS
ROUNDUP
A brilliantly plotted
debut about
copycat killings,
plus an intriguing
take on le Carré.
By John Dugdale
Stuart Neville’s The House
of Ashes (Zaffre £14.99) moves
to and fro between two
households in Northern
Ireland dominated by
monstrous, oppressive men.
In one, Sara is a gaslit captive
in a coercive marriage, and in
the other (on the same site,
but 60 years earlier), women
and girls are kept as slaves by
three farmers — Mary, the sole
survivor of this hellish 1960s
farm, is the previous occupant
of Sara’s home. It’s only fair
to mention that several other
crime writers have hailed the
book as outstanding, but I felt
that Neville struggled to find a
way (other than by escalating
the violence) of translating its
potentially powerful set-up
into suspenseful and
surprising storytelling.
Gwendy’s Final Task (Hodder
£16.99), by Stephen King and
Richard Chizmar, completes
their trilogy about Gwendy
Peterson, a writer periodically
entrusted with a “button box”
with magical powers for good
and evil. Now a US senator,
she’s on a rocket trip in 2026
where her secret mission is to
convey the destructive box to
somewhere beyond recovery.
This is minor King, but it has
genuine charm as a quirky,
hybrid oddity — essentially
a children’s fairytale, but
with an elderly world-saving
heroine who is starting to
succumb to Alzheimer’s. cThe daughter of a serial killer
who was jailed when she
was 12, the narrator of Stacy
Willingham’s A Flicker in the
Dark (HarperCollins £14.99) is
a psychologist who outwardly
appears to have put the
ordeal behind her. Chloe’s
precarious mental stability is
jeopardised, however, when
more girls are murdered inSuperbly rendered Debut
novelist Stacy Willinghamthriller
OF THE
MONTHMARY HANNAH HARTE28 6 February 2022