Megan Abbott’s El Dorado Drive (Virago, £22) is a dark, satisfying delight. Abbott’s writing has always been hypnotic, projecting a powerful sense of women’s inner lives and desires through the prisms of noir and suspense.
El Dorado Drive – her first novel explicitly set in her hometown, the archetypal old-money Detroit suburb of Grosse Pointe, where “Eisenhower was still president” – anchors that strength in a newly intimate sense of place. Abbott also has some new razor-edged fun here with American suburbia’s satire-ready pathologies as they break through the patina of country club life.
The three Bishop sisters take centre stage: Pam’s ex has stolen their kids’ college funds; Debra’s helping her husband through chemo; and Harper’s coping with a break-up. Born into comfort, these three “never thought about money until it was gone and then it was all any of them thought about”.
Heavily indebted and newly evicted, Harper’s crashing with Pam, who tells her about the Wheel. Ostensibly a women’s support group, each meeting of the Wheel concludes with a woman receiving a pile of cash from the newest members. Although one character unconvincingly insists the Wheel’s “not a pyramid … It’s a triangle,” Harper recognises it means “selling the women you knew. Even the ones you loved,” by capitalising on their economic vulnerability. Struggling with her own secrets and debts, Harper sets aside her unease to join the group.
As the scheme plays out, a narcotic mix of regret, fear and love drives Abbott’s characters forward, until someone winds up dead. The local cops, used to “toilet paper vandalism and DUIs”, are quickly out of their depth, leaving Harper to push for answers. As Harper tries to piece it all together, Abbott subtly moves her characters through slyly crafted surprises to a satisfying conclusion that betrays none of this book’s intoxicating depth.
Another great Detroit-area writer, Elmore Leonard – one of America’s most distinctive crime novelists – gets some well-designed reissues from the Penguin Modern Classics: Crime and Espionage list.
Like Abbott, Leonard has a gift for giving characters their own voices, his spare prose doing so as concisely as possible, even when – as in the lead reissue, Rum Punch (Penguin, £9.99) – describing extravagantly dramatic things like Nazi killing, gun running and money smuggling.
Three of Rum Punch’s main characters return from another welcome reissue, The Switch, where the kidnapping of a Detroit developer’s wife very much fails to go as planned. Ordell, Louis and Melanie haven’t grown noticeably luckier, smarter or kinder since then, but Rum Punch gets a different spark from airline steward Jackie, who’s entangled in their schemes. Both more complex and easier to root for, Jackie is drawn as vividly as anything in Leonard’s best work, and she makes Rum Punch sing.
Irish-Canadian journalist Luke Beirne’s third novel, the quietly moving Saints Rest (Baraka Books, CAD$24.95), is set around St John, Newfoundland, an atmospherically drawn landscape that’s key to the story.
Narrator Frank Cain is the junior member of a small PI agency, weighed down by a job that too often involves “helping the rich stay rich and the poor stay hungry”. Warily, he takes on a new client, Malory Fleet, whose son Jason, a low-level dealer, was murdered exactly a year ago. Now, Jason’s girlfriend Amanda has disappeared, and Malory, who sees her as a daughter, wants her back.
Immersing himself in the case, Frank soon loses his moorings, uncertain even whether Amanda fled or was taken. As he tries to find Amanda without losing himself along the way, Saints Rest unfolds quickly to a short, sharp shock of a conclusion.
Paul Vidich’s The Poet’s Game (No Exit, £18.99), an espionage thriller set in 2018 Washington and Moscow, is a worthy follow-up to his memorable Beirut Station. Vidich details political gamesmanship with an exactitude in the tradition of John le Carré, whose influence he ably honours.
A former CIA operative, Alex Matthews now runs Trinity Capital, a financial firm in Moscow, a city he knows well from his days as the CIA station chief. When the CIA director asks Alex back to help extricate an asset he recruited – code name Byron, the last remaining agent of his old network – Alex agrees.
His sense of duty lingers, though his commitment to the CIA had long been diminishing “like a slow dusk” because of the agency’s growing hypocrisy, leading to his marginalisation and early retirement. As Alex soon discovers, that institutional hypocrisy has endured: it looms large here, resting uneasily alongside his own love, guilt, and grief.
A tragic personal backstory reverberates throughout the novel, adding depth to Alex’s character without overwhelming the central plot. The action moves ahead at an elegant pace and concludes on a pitch-perfect note.
Hugely popular bestseller Karin Slaughter starts a new series with We Are All Guilty Here (HarperCollins, £22). Although some of the seams show – this is a long book, full of plot twists and more than enough characters to populate several titles – Slaughter’s clearly a real pro who’s very, very skilled at what she does.
The propulsive first third captures the pressure between being a teen in a small town and the often naive helplessness of the adults struggling to love them. Desperate to be adults, Madison Dalrymple and Cheyenne Baker find themselves dangerously out of their depth. When they disappear, the community rushes to find them.
While trying to ensure that fear doesn’t make neighbours “tear each other apart”, Deputy Emmy Clifton-Lang and her father Sheriff Gerald Clifton quickly find damning physical evidence, but their interrogations provide the leads that matter most.
Twelve years later, another girl disappears in disturbingly similar circumstances. This case throws its shadows over Emmy’s own family, leaving bruises that will surely linger through the series. Embedded in its small Georgia town, We Are All Guilty Here stands out for often being as invested in these families as in the crimes they encounter.
Spinning a tale of hubris, Bangladesh memories, and exotic meats, K Anis Ahmed’s Carnivore (HarperCollins, £16.99) is an energetic romp through a moneyed world that stops at nothing to feed its ego.
Bangladeshi emigrant Kash Mirza opened an exclusive Manhattan restaurant in the summer of 2008, when “alpha-nerds with PhDs in stochastic mathematics or God-knows-what had no clue … markets would tank …everyone would be a millionaire.” Kash rode this wave as blindly as the rest, never anticipating the imminent crash. By the fall, though, those financial sharks “turned into broken relics” and Kash faces being broken too, by Boris, a gangster from whom he borrowed a bit too much a bit too often. Trying to figure out how he landed in such a precarious situation, Kash summons the ghosts of his childhood and of his fellow ex-pats.
As Boris presses for repayment, cutting off Kash’s pinky along the way, Carnivore follows Kash’s increasingly inspired efforts to survive. He soon double-talks his way to a meeting with an international group of billionaire gastronomes, selling them an “Evening of Danger” to appease their ennui.
As the novel moves to its culinary climax and Kash’s rationalisations accumulate, Ahmed surrounds him with a vivid secondary cast, making this a charmingly gruesome depiction of his race for survival.
