Attica Locke’s Heaven, My Home, a new series from Ann Cleeves, Mark Edwards’ Here To Stay and Playboy by Joe Thomas, thrillers of the month
Heaven, My Home
Attica Locke Serpent’s Tail £14.99
Attica Locke has established herself as one of America’s finest crime novelists.
Heaven, My Home takes us into the swamplands of East Texas. A young white boy has gone missing: presumed drowned, possibly murdered.
Texas Ranger Darren Matthews has to steer a path between the local black community and the recent incomers: angry white rednecks.
This is both a beautifully wrought mystery and an incisive portrait of the American South in the age of Trump.
The Long Call
Ann Cleeves Macmillan £16.99
Famed for her Shetland crime series, Ann Cleeves has now moved operations to the opposite end of the UK.
DI Matthew Venn investigates the murder of a drifter on the north Devon coast. It’s a case that leads him back to the fundamentalist religious cult he grew up in, and has tried hard to escape.
Once again Cleeves combines a flair for evoking sense of place with a thoughtful, complex plot.
Here To Stay
Mark Edwards Thomas & Mercer £20
Elliot Foster has a successful career and lovely house, but no one to share it with until beautiful Gemma Robinson arrives in his life. So far so good – but then her parents come to stay.
A pair of selfish, sinister freeloaders, they flatly refuse to leave. Gradually Elliot starts contemplating desperate measures to get rid of them.
This is a clever and horribly plausible contribution to the burgeoning genre of London property noir.
Playboy
Joe Thomas Arcadia £9.99
Modern day São Paulo is a sprawling, chaotic, amazing place ideally suited to crime fiction.
Police detective Mario Leme is a decent man, regularly pushed to his limits and this time he’s framed for murder.
Mario’s struggle to clear his name will take him right into the dark heart of the city’s endemic corruption.
Thomas’s fine series offers a wonderfully vivid introduction to a society in violent, vibrant flux.