LS Hilton’s debut, Maestra (Zaffre, €19.50), opens with Judith, an assistant at a London auction house, taking a part-time job as a hostess in a sleazy champagne bar.
Intoxicated by the easy money and resenting the way her snobbish auction-house colleagues ignore her genuine love of art, Judith schemes to escape her dead-end life, using her knowledge of art, her sexuality and a white-hot rage to get whatever it is her heart desires.
The basic plot, which finds Judith cutting a swathe through the south of France, Rome and Paris, is modelled on Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr Ripley: the working-class Judith appreciates the finer things in life more than those who possess them, and thus she is entitled to appropriate her baubles by any means necessary.
Where Highsmith created a tragedy, however, Maestra borders on knowing farce, particularly in the way Judith transforms virtually overnight from meek art-house assistant into a slick sociopathic killer (Judith is more James Bond than Tom Ripley).
Nevertheless, it's a glamorous, witty and adrenaline-fuelled romp – if you like your heroines sexy, vengeful, amoral and lethal, Maestra delivers in spades.
In Melanie Raabe’s debut, The Trap (Mantle, €20.55), literary author Linda Conrads has been a recluse since her younger sister Anna was murdered 11 years previously.
Linda glimpsed the killer at the scene of the crime and is terrified he will one day return to tidy up the loose ends. When she happens to see the killer on TV, however, and realises he is the award-winning journalist Victor Lenzen, she writes her first thriller, Blood Sisters, using the details of Anna's killing, and then lures Lenzen into her home on the pretext of granting her first ever major interview.
It’s a conceit that is at best improbable – Linda strives to reassure herself and the reader that spotting her sister’s murderer on TV is “highly unlikely – but not impossible” – as the novel evolves into a dangerous game of psychological one-upmanship between Linda and Lenzen.
But the most fascinating aspect of the story is Linda’s descent into paranoia and guilt, a woman so deranged by grief she is no longer sure of who she is or where fiction ends and reality begins.
Set in Japan, Six Four (Quercus, €25.50) is the first of Hideo Yokoyama’s novels to be translated into English, and centres on Supt Yoshinobu Mikami, a former detective now working with the police press department. The title refers to a 14-year-old case, the unsolved kidnap and murder of a girl called Shoko.
Media scrutiny
With the statute of limitations falling due, the pressure is on to track down the killer. Caught between the rock of his solidarity to his colleagues and the hard place of media scrutiny, Mikami and his wife Minako are also suffering the excruciating grief of not knowing the whereabouts of their young daughter, Ayumi.
Did Ayumi leave home voluntarily? Or are there more sinister forces at play? An unusual but absorbing police procedural that is equally rooted in Mikami's personal and professional lives, Six Four is an epic account of a cold-case investigation that may, for the reader who prefers a pacy read, be a little too scrupulously diligent when it comes to recording the details of the fractious relationship that exists between police and press.
Carlo Gébler’s The Wing-Orderly’s Tales (New Island, €9.95), set in the fictional Loanend Prison in Belfast, is comprised of a series of anecdotes about Harold “Chalky” Chalkman’s fellow prisoners, with Chalky’s position as orderly and go-between making him a confidant of both prisoners and prison guards.
The narrative form is unusual, lying somewhere between a short-story collection and a novel (the stories are closely linked but self-contained), as Gébler details the sad, quirky, blackly funny and tragic events that befall a host of characters, all known by their prison nicknames (“Eskimo”, “Smurf”, “Sweet Gene”, “Magic”).
In the past, Gébler was a creative writing tutor at the Maze prison and writer-in-residence in Maghaberry prison, and he invests these stories with a gripping verisimilitude, not least when outlining the perverse unofficial rules that apply in prison. One character, for example, is brutally punished for hating the paramilitaries who killed his mother.
It’s a slim but powerful book that subtly explores the early causes and life-long consequences of criminality, its underlying theme summed up in the advice the recidivist Chalky is offered but ultimately rejects: “It may be a jail but that doesn’t mean you have to act like it’s one.”
Blood Will Out (Corsair, €19.50) is American novelist Walter Kirn’s “True Story of a Murder, a Mystery and a Masquerade”, in which Kirn details his relationship with Clark Rockefeller, aka “the most prodigious serial impostor in recent history”. When Rockefeller is charged with murder a couple of decades after their first meeting, Kirn’s life is thrown into turmoil, and he sets out to discover the truth behind the façade.
What follows is an astonishing story of duplicity as Kirn discovers the full extent of the deviousness of a sociopath who could well have been the model for Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley, a social-climbing chameleon who not only understands “his literary provenance” but channels his failed literary ambitions into manipulating real people instead of fictional characters: “He didn’t live by writing,” observes Kirn, “he wrote by living.”
It couldn't have worked as a novel – the "plot" is preposterous, but Kirn's exploration of his own complicity in Rockefeller's illusions makes Blood Will Out a bravura account of true crime reportage.
Declan Burke is an author and journalist. His latest novel is The Lost and the Blind
