The Last Breath

Sharp Objects

Skin Privilege

THE LAST BREATH, THE third of the planned Paddy Meehan Quintet, is as wonderful as the other two. Meehan, first encountered as a gauche wannabe journalist on the Glasgow Daily News, is now, in 1990, a columnist on the paper. She’s still fat, funny, combative, guilt-ridden, unduly loyal and emotionally haphazard, but she’s become an anxious single mum and slightly reduced her level of irresponsible behaviour.

The body of Terry Patterson, her mentor, friend and first lover, has been found naked and shot in the head; his will has left everything to her. She’s sure he was murdered by the IRA. But the police aren’t interested in her theory, nor is her newspaper. Alone and dangerously, she pursues her inquiries, while at the same time having to cope with the release from prison of a scary toddler-killer, and with her sister’s unhappiness as a nun.

Meehan is irresistible, the dialogue sparkles with wit and Mina’s portrayal of edgy Glasgow in 1990 is riveting.

Gillian Flynn’s Sharp Objects won the Crime Writers’ Association award for the best debut novel of the past year – and also the prize for the best adventure / thriller in the James Bond tradition, which, emphatically, it is not. Sharp Objects is a combination of straightforward detection, psychological frightener and American South gothic. Camille Preaker, a reporter on a Chicago paper, is sent on assignment to Wind Gap, Missouri, where a nine-year-old girl has been murdered and another, aged ten, has disappeared.

Wild Gap is also Camille’s home town, which she hated and left as soon as she could. Her return, unwelcomed by her mother, reopens old wounds and unresolved issues, as much in herself as in her family. The missing girl is found dead, her teeth extracted, but Camille’s attempts to find out more about the two killings are blocked by a hostile police and suspicious residents.

As she investigates for herself, Camille – with her own history of mental instability – is gradually sucked back into her clammy family and claustrophobic community. Disturbing and highly atmospheric.

If Gillian Flynn is an excellent debutante in that category of crime fiction, Karin Slaughter is the high mistress. No one does American small-town evil more chillingly.

In Skin Privilege her three principal characters – police chief, Jeffrey Tolliver, his medical examiner wife, Sara, and the troubled and troublesome police detective Lena Adams – are once again drawn into a vortex of violence, prejudice, horror, revenge and psychological gloom, as Lena finds herself suspected of a vicious murder in the South Georgia town from which she once escaped, and Jeffrey and Sara come to help.

Slaughter’s writing can be dense and overheated, but she tells a dark story that grips and doesn’t let go.

The Last Breath Bantam, £12.99; 352pp

Sharp Objects W&N, £10; 336pp

Skin Privilege Century, £10; 416pp

Buy the books here

Times Recommends

• Superfreakonomics by Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• Vincent van Gogh’s letters show the soul of the artist