Somehow Meg Gardiner manages to take stock suspense plots — a dedicated and relentless FBI behavioural analyst pursuing an ingenious serial killer — and dress them up into the kind of pulse-pounding, irresistibly readable thrillers you can’t help but in inhale in one sitting.
In The Dark Corners of the Night, the third novel in the UNSUB series, Caitlin Hendrix targets a Los Angeles killer who breaks into houses late at night when the family is home, executes both parents, and leaves the children alive as witnesses. He calls himself The Midnight Man. And he might just be the most vicious murderer Caitlin and the FBI’s elite Behavioural Analysis Unit has ever faced. Until the sequel, you’d assume. Which can’t come soon enough.
This is a world class thriller by one of the world’s premier thriller writers. Meg Gardiner has turbocharged the thriller genre. If you need some edge-of-your-seat escapism — and who doesn’t right now — look no further.
ISBN: 9781982627515
Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
Publication date: 02/18/2020
The New Girl — the nineteenth Gabriel Allon thriller by genre stalwart (and personal favourite) Daniel Silva — is a gripping, fast-moving and intelligent spy novel that negotiates the geopolitical fautlines of the Middle East, as the head of Israeli intelligence is compelled to aid the heir to the Saudi throne to negotiate the release of his kidnapped daughter.
I’ve whined before about a distinct absence of “metropolitan cops” in this new age of Australian crime fiction. Los Angeles has Bosch. Edinburgh has Rebus. Quebec has Gamache. Galway has Reilly. New Orleans has Robicheaux. Once upon a time, Sydney had Cliff Hardy and Scobie Malone. Melbourne had Jack Irish. But the notion of the quintessential city detective seems to have faded. Australian crime fiction has turned its focus to our harsh landscape. Geography has become king. And used to great effect. But where are the stories that flip the coin, and tackle our big cities? Here’s one — Katherine Firkin’s debut, Sticks and Stones.
Powerful and raw, harrowing and unsentimental, incredibly ambitious yet tightly focused in its scope, Your House Will Pay confronts the legacy of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, when the city exploded into violence after four white police officers were acquitted of any wrongdoing in the beating of Rodney King. Laced with tension and suspense, Steph Cha’s novel proves the past is prologue as it probes the residual pain, rage and grief felt by two families almost 30 years after a young black girl named Ava Matthews was shot to death by a Korean woman, who mistakenly believed the girl was stealing from her convenience store; an adaptation of the real-life murder of Latasha Harlins, a 15-year-old black girl fatally shot by convenience store owner Soon Ja Du, who was sentenced to five years of probation, 400 hours of community service, and a $500 fine.
This team-up between two of thriller-lit’s most enduring creations — Lee Child’s Jack Reacher and Karin Slaughter’s Will Trent — is exactly what you’d expect it to be; nothing more, nothing less. Our heroes meet, inside Fort Knox, and become instant foes, before quickly forming a partnership that enables them to take on some bad dudes, and uncover a criminal ring operating inside the famous United States Army post. It’s bread and butter stuff from Child and Slaughter; a fun short-story-length aside, with an interesting connection to Reacher’s debut adventure, Killing Floor, with some amusing banter between the two leads, but ultimately, it reads more like a trailer for a full-size adventure we’re never actually going to see in print.
This opener to a new series set in Robert Ludlum’s Jason Bourne universe — now 15 novels deep thanks to Eric Van Lustbader — sees a former Treadstone operative (the organisation that created Bourne) yanked back into the violent world he thought he’d left behind when he receives a foreboding email from a former colleague, and is soon after attacked by a kill squad.
At 1,500 pages, Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy is the longest book I’ve ever read, and possibly the longest book I ever want to read. I consumed it — or it consumed me — over two weeks of vacation. I ingested 300-page chunks on multiple plane journeys and bus rides, and piecemeal between festivities at a frenzied Indian wedding. It was never anything less than utterly compelling and all-consuming, but it truly sung during those uninterrupted hours of ceaseless reading; when the plot points, characters, and their innumerable strands of connective tissue truly came to the fore, alongside the luminous immensity of its scale and scope.