Crime and thrillers of the month – review

Bella Mackie, author of How to Kill Your Family, is back with another deliciously titled tale of murder, What a Way to Go (The Borough Press). This begins at the 60th birthday party of the impossibly rich Anthony Wistern: “Fragrant wife, tick. Gaggle of photogenic children, French chateau, Cotswold manor, a plethora of mistresses and a penchant for cutting moral corners, tick, tick, tick.” Unfortunately for Anthony he’s soon discovered skewered on a huge metal spike in a lake in his grounds. Police – and a local true-crime obsessive – investigate his death, with each of his four grasping children and his wife, Olivia, all under suspicion.
Mackie has assembled a gloriously repugnant cast – everyone here, apart from her rather sweet TikTok sleuth, is dreadful, but in a pleasurably awful way. Olivia, in particular, is brilliantly drawn: “I’ve never been one to obsess over my children like other women – your offspring don’t constitute a personality after all,” she says, and: “Last night, when I saw her eccentric drop-waisted tartan dress, I’d wondered how it was possible we had maintained our decades-long friendship.”
We don’t miss out on the views of Anthony, either: he’s horrified to find, after his death, that he’s in a processing centre with a cheap lino floor, and a woman named Susan is telling him that he has to find out how he died (he’s forgotten) before he can move on. A dark, funny story of a very dysfunctional family.
Laura Sims’s excellent How Can I Help You (Verve Books) opens with an epigraph from Clarice Lispector: “Who has not asked himself at some time or other: am I a monster or is this what it means to be a person?” We then meet Margo, who isn’t really called Margo, as she lands a job at a library. “Can’t catch me,” she thinks to the world, as she sheds her previous identity as a murderous nurse and sinks into the quiet stacks and shelves of her new life. But then failed novelist Patricia joins the staff as a reference librarian, and Margo feels Patricia watching her – particularly when an elderly patron (Margo keeps slipping and calling them “patients”) dies in the toilets. Can Margo keep her past hidden or will Patricia carry on digging? As the two women watch each other, Margo’s calm demeanor starts to slip and her behaviour becomes increasingly erratic. “After my restless night, I notice things I shouldn’t, like the pulse in one woman’s neck as I scan her books.” It is disturbing, compelling – and a lot of fun.
Nilesha Chauvet’s debut, The Revenge of Rita Marsh (Faber), is the story of a vigilante, Rita, who spends her days working in a care home and her nights posing as young girls online to lure men into the open. “I’ll hunt them down, one by one. I’ll make sure they’re off our roads for good. I know who they are, I know where they live. But they will never really know me.” But when a sting goes wrong and a man ends up dead, she starts to question what she’s doing and why – until she finds out that an old schoolfriend has a disturbing story of her own to tell, and Rita’s dragged back in.
Chauvet shows, with skill, how easily the veneer of civilised behaviour can be scraped away, as well as looking hard into the grey areas that exist between right and wrong. As she writes in her prologue: “It was simply a result of a line crossed. But that line, as I know now, is as thin as a spider’s web, though it gives the impression that it is unbreakable.” I hope to see more of Rita in the future.
Time for some Scottish autumnal chills with a supernatural element in Michael J Malone’s The Torments (Orenda Books), the second in his Annie Jackson series (although you don’t need to have read the first to enjoy this). Annie is cursed by “the murmurs” – voices that bring her visions of imminent deaths – and is hiding out in a remote cottage by a loch, where the clamour is quieter. It’s not all peaceful though – the locals are hostile, particularly after she fails to warn a young man of his impending doom. “She could have saved him. She could have spoken up. Shame washed over her, then set and solidified over her skin, muscle and bone until she was nothing but an unmoving length of granite.”
But then she’s asked for help by her adoptive mother, whose nephew, Damien, has gone missing. Can Annie’s talents help find him? Reluctantly, Annie and her brother, Lewis, start investigating – and find themselves uncovering a world of black magic and murder. A creepy tale with the terrifying legend of the baobhan sith at its core.