Across the new crime novels we write about this week you’ll visit some pretty remote places – forgotten mining towns, backwoods places and the fringes of cities where tourists never venture. In one set-up, the people fear going venture outside. Even in their international political thriller, Louise Penny and Mellissa Fung will send their protagonists to a side of China we never get to see… These settings are bleak and humdrum, though anything but ordinary. Are we seeing a return to rural noir with a suffocating sense of isolation in crime fiction? Maybe. Is it a trend? What could be driving it? Mystery awaits…
The Hollow Boys by Tariq Ashkanani
Multi-award-winning Scottish author Tariq Ashkanani is back on 14 May with a compelling slice of American Gothic. The Hollow Boys is set in the doomed town of Aurora, a place living on borrowed time as a deep seam of coal burns underground, with the danger getting ever closer, year by year. It’s also a place where a missing boy suddenly returns after being lost for nine months. Danny Yates and his best friend Will Keefe were presumed drowned, but now Danny is back – and steadfastly maintaining that he’s Will. Are dark forces at work? Chief of Police John Deacon takes a more pragmatic approach – and sets out to discover what really happened.
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The Last Mandarin by Louise Penny & Mellissa Fung
Best known for her Three Pines series, featuring Sûreté du Québec Chief Inspector, Armand Gamache, Canadian crime author Louise Penny picks up a writing partner in the shape of journalist Mellissa Fung and goes global in The Last Mandarin, out on 12 May. It is suspected that the Chinese are to blame when fire and security alarms go off simultaneously right across the world – and the White House summons global human rights activist Vivien Li and her daughter Alice in the hope that they can figure out why. With bad actors on both sides determined to stop the pair, Vivien and Alice must put family issues aside and work together – but could the answer lie in a centuries-old legend?
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Echoes of the Lost by Cindy Brown
The plight of a young boy is also at the heart of Echoes of the Lost by Cindy Brown, published on 12 May. Retired detective Ster McCaffrey is mourning the death of his wife and living a quiet life in Portland, Oregon – until a small child is left on his doorstep. Who is the boy’s mother and where is she? What led her to abandon her son? McCaffrey’s search leads him to the forgotten corners of the city and the homeless community that exists there. But with a brain injury that impairs his detection skills, he must rely on help from others, some of whom are reluctant to get involved.
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From the Dust by David Swinson
Ready for some rural noir? Then you’ve found it, in the shape of David Swinson’s From the Dust, out now and set in a small town in the Finger Lakes area of upstate New York. Former Washington DC homicide detective Graham Sanderson has moved there to look after his shut-in brother, Tommy, craving peace and a quiet life – but that dream is shattered when a body is found and the local chief of police who is also a friend of the family asks for Sanderson’s help. The small, insular community doesn’t take kindly to incomers, so how far will they go to keep deeply buried secrets hidden?
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Seldom Seen Road by John Degen
Seldom Seen Road is the first in John Degen’s series of murder mysteries set in the Burnt River, Northern Ontario, and featuring the Roth family detective trio: Mark, his daughter Stephanie, and his cousin Jeremy, published on 7 May. Criminologist Stephanie and Constable Jeremy have obvious credentials for crime solving, while freshly retired Mark is hard of hearing, widowed and a man with a penchant for getting himself in harm’s way to get to the truth. Together they must set to work after the body of local environmental activist Paul Robichaud washes up on the river bank, the blunt-force wounds to his head pointing to murder,
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Ash Land by Matt Harry
Sci-fi meets cri-fi in Matt Harry’s Ash Land, released on 4 May. The Ash are flesh-eating microbots that escaped from a lab in France and quickly spread across the globe – killing 20 per cent of the population in the process. The only way to escape them was to seal yourself inside but those who managed it can now only access the outside world through remote-controlled drones or hazmat suits. Kai Braddock was a cop, until the Ash and a bitter divorce forced him to quit. Now he is a bounty hunter, using drones to capture fugitives in Los Angeles – until his partner is murdered and Kai is forced to do the unthinkable… go outside for the first time in over two years.
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