We Solve Murders by Richard Osman (Viking, £22)
Osman’s eagerly awaited new series features bodyguard Amy Wheeler and her ex-copper father-in-law, Steve. Amy has been sent by her employer, Maximum Impact Solutions, to protect flamboyant bestselling novelist Rosie D’Antonio from a Russian oligarch who has taken exception to his portrayal in one of her books. Meanwhile, leading influencers who are clients of Maximum Impact Solutions are being murdered in an apparent attempt to frame Amy. Steve, widowed and lonely, is protecting his fragile equilibrium with a routine of unofficial surveillance and weekly pub quiz nights. After an attempt on Amy’s life, Steve reluctantly agrees to her request for backup and the odd threesome race around the globe, trying to figure out what’s going on while staying one step ahead of the hitman. Steve, who would not be out of place among the denizens of the Thursday Murder Club, comes off the page more successfully than Amy, but this caper, written in Osman’s trademark genial style, is sure to please.
Guide Me Home by Attica Locke (Viper, £18.99)
The last title in Locke’s award-winning Highway 59 trilogy is set in 2019. As is often the case with final volumes, it’s as much about delivering a whole-story resolution as providing a standalone mystery. Locke manages a good balance between the two, with protagonist Darren Mathews struggling to reconcile an origin story that turns out to contain as many “alternative facts” as a Trump press briefing. With the threat of indictment for his role in a previous case hanging over him, Mathews hands in his Texas Ranger badge, but a visit from his estranged mother propels him into an unofficial investigation. Sera Fuller, the only Black student in a sorority house at a local college, has gone missing, but nobody seems to care. Then a visit to Sera’s family home, in a town owned by a corporation that employs all the adult residents, reveals that what appears to be a sort of benevolent dictatorship has a very dark side. This is compelling political crime fiction.
Five By Five by Claire Wilson (Michael Joseph, £18.99)
Inaugural winner of the publisher’s Undiscovered Writers’ Prize, Five By Five is set in a Scottish prison in 2018. Protagonist Kennedy Allardyce is, like the author, a prison intelligence analyst (a five by five is an intelligence report) and this assured debut rings with authenticity – the claustrophobia, harsh choices, boredom and filth of prison life are evoked so strongly that you can almost smell the place. Kennedy is all too aware what a dangerous environment prison can be, and that what happens inside can have repercussions outside: she has just returned to work after being attacked when the anonymity on which her job relies was breached. She finds herself dangerously attracted to a new officer, Molly, and the feeling appears to be mutual, but there are rumours of a corrupt guard and some of Molly’s behaviour is suspect. Tense, chilling and distinctive, this is a one-sitting read.
The Night of Baba Yaga by Akira Otani, translated by Sam Bett (Faber, £9.99)
Otani’s Japanese thriller centres on women in the overwhelmingly male world of the yakuza. Shindo, doubly an outsider because she is female and of dual heritage, is kidnapped by gangsters for her fighting ability and given the role of bodyguard to Shoko, the imperious 18-year-old daughter of the boss of the Naiki family. Shoko, who is being groomed by her father for a dynastic marriage to a sadistic business associate, has accepted her friendless and restricted life. However, she begins to rebel as she forms a bond with Shindo, who relates her grandmother’s stories about the Russian witch Baba Yaga, who is able to live life on her own terms. Searingly violent and wonderfully tender by turns, this short novel about devotion, agency and the price of freedom packs a big punch.
I Died at Fallow Hall by Bonnie Burke-Patel (Bedford Square, £16.99)
Her career cut short by injury, former ballerina Anna has moved to a cottage in the grounds of Fallow Hall, a stately Cotswolds pile, where Lord Blackwaite allows her the place rent-free in exchange for restoring the garden. It’s a solitary existence, funded by the sale of her homegrown produce at the local market. There she meets another newcomer, DI Hitesh Mistry, who finds himself adrift in the countryside. Their nascent mutual attraction must be put aside when Anna digs up a skeleton in her vegetable patch – but who is she? A timeflip back to 1967, when the unnamed daughter of the then Lord Blackwaite reveals her desperation to escape her tyrannical father, seems to provide a clue. Burke-Patel’s debut is both a traditional country-house mystery and an examination of loneliness, the difficulty of making connections with others, and how hard it can be to escape the roles imposed on us by family and society.