CRIME
ROUNDUP
The Himalayas are one of
the world’s most hostile
environments. They provide
an atmospheric setting in
Breathless (M Joseph £12.99),
a thrilling first novel by the
Chinese-Canadian author
Amy McCulloch, who has
previously written fiction for
young adults. Her protagonist,
an inexperienced journalist
called Cecily Wang, is
surprised to be offered an
exclusive interview with a
celebrity mountaineer, Charles
McVeigh, who has been
involved in several notable
rescues. But there’s one
condition: she has to
accompany him on an attempt
to climb one of the toughest
peaks in Nepal, Mount
Manaslu, without oxygen.
The expedition gets off to a
bad start, with the suspicious
remembers harrowing events
20 years ago when a local girl
went missing and a 14-year-old
boy confessed to her murder.
The boy was sent to a young
offenders’ institution, but now
he has been released,
returning home only to find
himself accused of another
murder. Eira’s investigation
stirs up the past in this
flawlessly constructed novel.
Even the Darkest Night
(MacLehose £16.99), translated
by Anne McLean, is the first in
a new series by Javier Cercas,
a former winner of the
European Book prize. His
description of the savage
murders of an elderly couple
does not make easy
reading, but Cercas
perfectly captures^
the fearful mood of
a town in rural
Catalonia after the
crime. He has also
come up with an
unusual detective, a
cop from Barcelona
who’s lying low to
protect his identity
after foiling a
terrorist attack. A
leisurely pace and
lengthy digressions
set the novel outside
mainstream crime
fiction, but it stays in
the memory.
Will Shindler is
a broadcastjournalist and scriptwriter
who recently turned to writing
crime fiction. His third novel,
The Hunting Ground (Hodder
£16.99), is a tour de force, set
in a single street in south
London. When a young
mother is murdered and her
son abducted, the urgent
need to find the boy means
that detectives don’t
immediately recognise
similarities with a crime in the
very same house two decades
earlier. Shindler uses this
haunting novel to explore
themes of loyalty, loss and the
unreliability of memory.
The Locked Room (Quercus
£20) is the latest novel in Elly
Griffiths’s long-running series
about an archaeologist, Ruth
Galloway, and her on-off lover,
DCI Nelson. A series of
apparent suicides of older
women looks suspicious, but
the police investigation is
hampered by the arrival of
Covid-19. Lockdown provides
a brilliant opportunity for
Griffiths, bringing fresh drama
into her characters’ lives, and
she makes the most of it. cdeath of an experienced
climber, and McCulloch ramps
up the tension as Cecily is
forced to rely on people she
no longer trusts. McCulloch
knows the terrain well, having
climbed the mountain herself,
and her novel is a visceral
account of a novice’s struggles
with thin air and exhaustion.
Tove Alsterdal is not well
known in this country, but
she’s one of Sweden’s most
admired crime writers. We
Know You Remember (Faber
£14.99), translated by Alice
Menzies, was named best
Swedish crime novel of
2020, and it’s a terrific
introduction for readers
who don’t know her
work. Eira Sjodin is a
police officer in the
provincial town where
she grew up. Like
everyone in the area sheFICTION
Claire Lowdon
The Swimmers by Julie Otsuka
Fig Tree £12.99 pp192
The day after Pearl Harbor,
Julie Otsuka’s grandfather was
arrested and incarcerated as
a “dangerous enemy alien”.
Otsuka’s mother, uncle and
grandmother were rounded
up with 120,000 other
Japanese-Americans and
transported from the Pacific
coast to internment camps
further inland. It was more
than three years before they
were allowed to return home.
This shocking and relatively
occluded history inspired
Otsuka’s first novel, When the
Emperor Was Divine (2002). It
Problem: how to follow a miraculously good second novel
Murder mountain
A gripping tale set in Nepal kicks off Joan Smith’s selection
DAVID LEVENSON/GETTY IMAGESwas a tight debut, full of
muted heartache and
judicious period detail. The
final pages were voiced for all
those arrested on suspicion of
treason. “You know who I am.
Or you think you do. I’m your
florist. I’m your grocer. I’m
your porter.. .” That brief
foray into a collective
narrative voice contained the
seed of Otsuka’s superlative,
sui-generis second novel, The
Buddha in the Attic (2011),
about a generation of Japanese
picture brides shipped to the
US in the early 1900s. The
whole novel is narrated,
dazzlingly, in the first-person
plural. “On the boat we were
mostly virgins.. .” Reading it is
a unique experience, the
collective and the particular
held in perfect, impossible
tension throughout.Otsuka’s new novel, The
Swimmers, also opens in the
first-person plural. The
collective “we” belongs to the
regulars at a swimming pool^
in modern-day America.
Compared with the torrent of
lives contained in The Buddha
in the Attic, the details
dispensed via the same
technique here can feel
indulgently pedestrian. “At
the pool, we are only one of
three things: fast-lane people,
medium-lane people or the
slow.” When a mysterious
crack opens up on the pool
bottom, things start to get
weird. “What if the crack is
a symptom of some deep-
rooted systemic decay? Or a
geological anomaly?” For
a while it feels as if we’ve
stumbled into a Kafka story.
Then, on page 69, weabruptly leave the pool. The
rest of the narrative follows
one swimmer, Alice, a retired
lab technician with dementia.
Her condition worsens and
her family move her to a care
home. Otsuka deftly contrasts
general truths about dementia
with the unique experience of
this individual and her family
(drawn, perhaps, from life:
Otsuka’s mother was a lab
technician, and the daughter
in this story is a novelist).
The second half implicitly
invites us to read the pool and
the crack as a metaphor for
the glorious, consuming
mundanity of daily life — from
which Alice is expelled once
her memory fractures. Alice’s
story is compelling, full of
well-placed details that form
an unsentimental portrait of a
woman, a wife and a mother.“She does not remember
saying to you, the other night,
right after your father left the
room, He loves me more than I
love him.”
But the two halves don’t
mesh well. Despite the
intimate nature of the
material, there is nothing^
as moving as this glimpse
of an anonymous woman in
The Buddha in the Attic,
dreaming every night of the
three-year-old daughter she
left behind in Japan, “a tiny
figure in a dark red kimono
squatting at the edge of a
puddle, utterly entranced by
the sight of a dead floating
bee”. Otsuka is a great writer
and The Buddha in the Attic is
a miraculous book, a micro-
encyclopaedia of killer detail.
The Swimmers, sadly, is not
its equal. cMcCulloch
has climbed
the peak
herself
BOOKS
CRIME
BOOK
OF THE
MONTH
High drama Amy McCulloch
ramps up the tension28 13 February 2022