Stitching real people and real events into fiction in a way that is hard-nosed
and edgy and relevant,” is how Eoin McNamee describes his method. After two
well-received novels on Northern Ireland’s Troubles, he turns his attention
in 12:23 (Faber £12.99) to Princess Diana’s death. A few days
before that fatal car crash, a team of superannuated British spies are
tasked with “discreet surveillance” of the princess and those around her in
Paris, as their shadowy paymaster is convinced she is inadequately
protected. Besides taking us inside their heads and those of other spooks
who they suspect of planning to assassinate her, McNamee risks imagining the
mental processes of the car’s driver Henri Paul and Diana (called “Spencer”
throughout) herself. 12:23 is strong on atmosphere and the seedy, humdrum
reality of bottom-feeder spying. It seems indecently early, however, to be
stitching its central event into fiction (most recent “faction” novels are
set at least 25 years ago); and while reliance on a conspiracy theory for
the portrayal of the crash is handy for shaping a thriller plot, it does
little for the novel’s credibility.
In giving its characters highly implausible thoughts (a former Special Branch
man admires the French for the way their airports “take responsibility for
the lyric matter of flying”), 12:23 illustrates one of the literary
thriller’s standard vices. Richard Flanagan’s The Unknown
Terrorist (Atlantic £14.99) exemplifies another, although only after a
beginning so brilliant it suggests he could be the next John le Carré if he
makes his shift to pulp fiction permanent. Gina, its heroine, is a
pole-dancer in Sydney who has a fling with a stranger called Tariq. Then she
discovers that he is wanted for alleged terrorist offences. Forced to go on
the run herself, she’s portrayed as his accomplice in a deranged television
documentary by a desperate reporter. The writing has the pizzazz you’d
expect from the award-laden author of Gould’s Book of Fish, and the
political and social satire is incisive. But Flanagan shows no appetite for
basic thriller chores such as maintaining excitement and working towards a
denouement, and the novel goes nowhere in its second half – all its points
already made, all its character-painting already done.
Hurting Distance (Hodder £19.99), the poet Sophie Hannah’s follow-up
to her remarkable crime debut, Little Face, skilfully counterpoints two
narratives. One is the first-person story of Naomi, a sundial-maker who
believes Robert, her married lover, has been murdered; the other
reintroduces DS Charlie Zailer, the smart but erratic distaff detective from
Little Face, who has to sift truth from lies or fantasy as Naomi changes her
story, claiming Robert raped her. Unlike Flanagan, Hannah assiduously
constructs a plot with an ending. But she, too, is a literary writer chafing
at the restrictions of genre conventions, in this case the depiction of a
believable police investigation: even if you buy Zailer’s reckless affair
with a potential suspect, other lapses simply don’t ring true. The novel
nevertheless confirms that Hannah is a rivetingly original arrival in crime
fiction, achieving a distinctive mix of darkness and girlie comedy.
Plausibility is not a problem for Linda Fairstein, a New York DA whose series
heroine, Alexa Cross, has the same job. Her initial task in the typically
slick Bad Blood (Little, Brown £11.99) is to convince a jury that
millionaire businessman Brendan Quillian strangled his wife. When Quillian
shoots a court officer with her own gun and escapes, however, things become
more complicated – has he killed anyone else? As Cross and her NYPD sidekick
Mike Chapman pursue the fugitive, they’re drawn into the secret subculture
of the builders of the city’s tunnels.
In Lee Child’s Bad Luck and Trouble (Bantam £14.99), Jack
Reacher reassembles the surviving members of the military police unit he
led, on learning some of their colleagues have been dropped from a
helicopter. Why they were murdered is what the former MPs first have to work
out; then they have to foil a fiendish terrorist plan to obtain
state-of-the-art deadly hardware. Once again, a formulaic action yarn is
really a pretext for exhibiting the enjoyable contradictions of Reacher,
part-ascetic, part-Robin Hood, part-gorilla.
Rob Ryan portrays Berlin in 1948-49 in Dying Day (Headline Review
£11.99), with flashbacks to wartime Paris. Laura McGill is in Germany
looking for her missing sister Diana, a British agent who has vanished;
Jimmy Webb, another spy, is among those she quizzes; and Lee Crane, her
pilot friend, flies in supplies in the Berlin airlift. The novel maintains
the high standards of Ryan’s historical sequence, with memorable characters
(some reappearing), fine set-piece scenes and a gritty realism in its use of
period colour that contrasts interestingly with the romanticism of Alan
Furst’s rival 1940s fiction.
Nicci French’s Losing You (M Joseph £12.99) takes place on the
40th birthday of Nina, its heroine and narrator. As it opens, she is looking
forward to a family holiday in Florida, but 15-year-old Charlie has
disappeared. Nina’s anxiety grows as she rings her daughter’s friends and
the newsagent for which she does a paper round, finding no innocent
explanation for her disappearance.
Anxiety turns to panic when Charlie’s abandoned bike is discovered, which
leads to the police conducting an investigation that Nina thinks
infuriatingly lacking in urgency. Unfolding over the course of one day and
told by a single voice, Losing You has headlong pace and exhilarating
intensity.
The murder of gay film lecturer Stephen Bryan is the latest case for John
Harvey’s Cambridge cop DI Will Grayson. In Gone to Ground
(Heinemann £12.99), he and DS Helen Walker quiz suspects including the dead
man’s former boyfriend and a menacing property tycoon, while coping with
personal problems. Meanwhile, Bryan’s sister, a radio journalist in
Nottingham, becomes fascinated by Stella Leonard, a 1960s film star, the
subject of a book he was writing. It’s an old-fashioned detective story, but
one that demonstrates how much such ostensibly lightweight entertainments
can encompass – celebrity now and then, marital friction, racism, mental
illness, sex abuse.
How much a thriller can encompass is shown by Richard North Patterson’s
562-page Exile (Macmillan £12.99). Its hero is David Wolfe, a
successful San Francisco lawyer who plans to run for congress. When Israel’s
prime minister is assassinated while visiting the city, Hana, a Palestinian
academic Wolfe had an affair with when they were in law school together, is
arrested on suspicion of being the terrorists’ handler. He offers to act as
her attorney, although this means sacrificing both his political ambitions
and his relationship with his Jewish fiancee. Hoping to discover who ordered
the assassination, Wolfe travels to the Middle East; and his encounters
there, and with Hana and her husband, are a comprehensive exploration of the
Israel-Palestine issue and its history. Exile can be stodgily pedagogical,
and the plot’s intended surprises can be predictable. But it’s a stunningly
ambitious novel, and on balance a successful one.
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