When Oliver Garland, a well-respected judge, dies—ostensibly of a heart attack—his daughter, Mariah, suspects foul play. Her brother, Tal, a professor of law at a university, is sceptical.

Oliver (whom Tal refers to as The Judge) was tipped to a Supreme Court judge, one of the two black judges. But at the hearings, he was repeatedly asked about his links with Jack Ziegler, a man who was involved in criminal activities (although nothing was proved). Jack is an old friend, and the Judge refuses to divulge the reasons for their meetings. He finally withdraws his candidature. The failure leaves him devastated.

At the funeral, Tal is approached by Jack, who keeps asking him about “the arrangements” that his father had made. Tal has no idea what Jack is talking about. Things get more complicated as Tal’s wife, Kimberly, is being considered for a vacancy on the federal court of appeals. She has worked very hard to get this far and is determined that Tal will not ruin her chances by stirring up any kind of controversy.

But then people around Oliver Garland start dying, and Tal has to put his career, marriage and life on the line to understand the cryptic message about chess that his father left him, knowing that of the three children, only Tal understood the game. He is helped—sort of—by Mariah, who has become obsessed with their father’s death, and as an ex-journalist, has a well-honed instinct on tracking down facts. But the more they explore, the more questions are raised.

Who is “Angela’s boyfriend”, the person who the Judge says has the answer? Who are the two men, purporting to be FBI agents, who interview Tal the day after his father dies? What is the oldest brother, Addison, not telling Mariah and Tal about the hit-and-run accident that killed their youngest sister? What on earth was Oliver Garland hiding?

This is a taut, beautifully written thriller and a glimpse into the lives of the privileged black community in the United States. It is lifts the lid on how Supreme Court judges are selected—the politics and manoeuvring behind the scenes. Stephen L. Carter can be scathing about the role of the Supreme Court: “it has been, for most of its history, a follower, not an agent, of change. … Like every other social institution, the Court has mainly been the ally of the insiders, a proposition that should come as no surprise, because only the insiders become the Presidents who nominate the Judges, the Senators who confirm them—or the candidates from whom the nominees are chosen in the first place.”

He also exposes the racism that permeates all layers of society. When Oliver Garland was being considered for the Supreme Court, someone remarked, “I hope Thurgood is keeping Oliver’s seat warm”, implying that there can be only one black judge on the Court at a time—not to mention the familiarity of using their first names to refer to both men. When Tal calls the police to report an attack on his on his campus, they almost arrest him, assuming that he was the assailant.

This is an intelligent, well-plotted thriller, and a delight to read. I would recommend it—I couldn’t put it down. And the best news? He’s written two more that form a loose trilogy!

This is a whodunit within a whodunit. One Friday evening, Susan Ryeland, the Head of Fiction at Cloverleaf Books, picks up Magpie Murders, the latest manuscript by Alan Conway—one of their most successful writers—and takes it home. She pours herself a glass of wine and starts to read.

As she reads the manuscript, so do we. Conway’s book is Anthony Horowitz’s homage to Agatha Christie. It reads like a traditional English murder mystery. Like Hercule Poirot, detective Atticus Pünd is a foreigner who has moved to the UK during the Second World War.

The manuscript of Magpie Murders begins in the village of Saxby-on-Avon with the funeral of Mary Blakiston, a woman who used to clean for Sir Magnus Pye, the owner of the big house, Pye Hall. Mary has been found dead at the bottom of the stairs in what looks like an accident. A few days later, Sir Magnus is found decapitated in his home.

There are rumours in the village that Mary has been murdered—her son Robert had been heard arguing with her the day before she died. The past also holds its secrets. Mary’s younger son Tom had drowned in the pond at Pye Hall when he was 11. Was Tom’s death really an accident?

Just as Pünd is about to reveal all, Susan finds that the last chapter of the manuscript is missing. She is not only frustrated but also worried—Conway’s books are vital to the publisher’s survival. The copy that Charles Clover, her boss, has is also incomplete.

Meanwhile, Conway has been found dead at the bottom of a tower in his mansion in Farmington. The verdict is suicide. He was diagnosed with a terminal illness, and Charles has a letter from him hinting at his intentions.

But Susan is not convinced and suspects foul play. When she goes to Farmington, she finds that the village mirrors Saxby-on-Avon. Many of the characters in the book are based on people living there—like Vicar Robeson who appears in the book as Osborne (an anagram of his name). Conway’s house is the model for Pye Hall. Was he trying to leave clues in his book about what was really going on?  

The story moves between the manuscript (set in Courier font) and Susan’s world. Horowitz also includes an excerpt from the first book that Conway wrote and the notes that Conway’s sister made about their childhood. Horowitz gets the different tones right—the pretentiousness of Conway’s early “serious” work is very different from the Atticus Pünd novel. But I’m not sure we needed two pages of it.

Horowitz said (in a Penguin Podcast) that writing a regular whodunit would be boring—the only way to liven it up would be to play with the form. He does that here and has great fun with it. I love whodunits and got two of them in one book here! This is an entertaining read, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Stuart Turton takes the traditional English setting for a whodunit—a country house thrumming with secrets, tensions and fears—and turns it into something completely unexpected. I have read a lot of crime fiction, and this is one of the most original books I’ve come across.

Take the way it begins.

“I forget everything between footsteps.
‘Anna!’ I finish shouting, snapping my mouth shut in surprise.
My mind has gone blank. I don’t know who Anna is or why I’m calling her name. …
‘How did—’ I’m cut short by the sight of my own hands. They’re bony, ugly. A stranger’s hands. I don’t recognize them at all.”

No, it’s not just a case of severe amnesia—the narrator, whose name we are told only halfway through the book because he has forgotten it—wakes up in a different body every morning (well, sometimes more often than that). Evelyn Hardcastle, the daughter of the host, is going to kill herself that evening. But the suicide is actually a murder, and the narrator has to find the killer if he is to get out of the house. His advantage is that time is on a loop, and the day keeps repeating itself. Endlessly.

The narrator (who eventually finds out that he is called Adrian) has eight hosts. He can only exist in these, never as himself. Each of these eight men is in some way involved in the murder, whether directly or indirectly. All of these are guests at the house or work there. But who are the others? The Footman, whose very mention terrifies Adrian but he doesn’t know why. Then there is the man in the mask with the beaked nose, who keeps appearing and seems to know far more than he is letting on. And finally, who is Anna? Is she a friend, a murderer or a victim whom Adrian has to save?

Each time Adrian wakes up in another body, he has to contend not just with the physical reality of his host but also his mental makeup, trying to use any skills or knowledge the man has without letting him overwhelm Adrian. And because time is on a loop, Adrian can build the day’s events from several points of view. He might even be able to save Evelyn.

It sounds a little too clever but somehow Turton keeps all the balls in the air. I honestly don’t know how he does it, but the timelines all add up. It was complicated enough to keep me hooked but not convoluted enough to make me give up. The way he describes Adrian inhabiting his hosts was brilliantly done—you are in their head but you are also observing them. It is a world of smoke and mirrors and as a reader, you find yourself trying to help Adrian solve the mystery, not just of the murder, but the way this world works.

Absolutely brilliant. Read this—I guarantee it will keep you up into the early hours of the morning.

“There are people who are drawn to water, who retain some vestigial, primal sense of where it flows. I believe I am one of them. I am most alive when I am near the water, when I am near this water.”

Nel Abbott was fascinated by the river in Beckford, a small British town, and especially by the Drowning Pool: a place of dark and light, where teenagers came to swim, to jump off the steep cliff into the pool but also known as a suicide spot. When Nel is found dead in the pool, the assumption is that she committed suicide.

But her estranged sister, Jules, does not believe it. Nel was not the sort of person who would kill herself. Was her death linked in some way to the book she was writing about the women who had lost their lives there, including Katie, her daughter Lena’s best friend? And why was Nel obsessed with Libby Seeton, a young woman drowned at the pool for being a witch? Was she right in thinking Beckford was “a place to get rid of troublesome women”?  There is after all, a fair bit of misogyny lurking beneath the surface, both in the town’s present and its past. “People turned a blind eye, though, didn’t they? No one liked to think about the fact that the water in that river was infected with the blood and bile of persecuted women, unhappy women; they drank it every day.”

The story is from the points of view of eleven of the characters—Jules, Lena, Sean and Erin, the detectives on the case, Katie’s mother, to name a few—sometimes in third person, sometimes in first. What I enjoy about this device is that you get the same incident from more than one perspective, or one characters picks up the narrative from another and takes it further.

Like Paula Hawkins’s earlier book, The Girl on the Train, there are no really likeable characters here. But they are interesting because they all conceal secrets, which makes them somewhat unreliable as narrators.

This is a good thriller. Hawkins is skilful at building up the picture from fragments of stories. And the reveals at the end just keep coming! I think The Girl on the Train was better—this book is a little less unusual but will still keep you turning the pages.

Her dedication says it all: “For all the troublemakers”.

“There is a balm in Gilead to make the wounded whole. There’s power enough in Heaven to cure a sin-sick soul.”

On the surface, this seems like a regular whodunit. But it is more than that—a story about losing and finding yourself, about art and landscape, and escaping from your past.

Armand Gamache, the former Chief Inspector of Homicide with the Sureté du Quebec, has retired with his wife Reine-Marie to Three Pines, a village with other people like him—people who have left their pasts behind. There is Myrna, a psychologist who now runs a bookshop (and provides therapy to her friends), Clara, an artist, Ruth, a bad-tempered poet and her duck, Rosa (no one is sure whether it should be Ruth and her duck or Rosa and her human).

Every morning, Armand sits on a bench overlooking the village with a book in his hand, The Balm of Gilead. Every morning Clara sits next to him but does not say much. Then one day she tells him that she is worried about her husband, Peter, who has disappeared. An established artist when Clara became famous, Peter had trouble dealing with her success. Upset at his lack of support, she suggested they take a year’s break from each other. Exactly a year later, Peter was supposed to come back, and they would see how they felt. However, Peter, normally very meticulous, did not show up on the appointed day, nor did he call or write.

Armand hates the thought of going back to the world he had left behind, but Clara is a friend. He asks his son-in-law, Jean-Guy, who used to be his second-in-command, for help, and the group of friends try to track Peter down.

The missing Peter is the centre of the book, and Louise Penny slowly and skilfully builds up a picture of the man. He grew up with a domineering, vicious mother, who stifled his creativity. He is obsessive about order and his paintings reflect this: they are controlled, detailed and essentially soulless. Unlike Clara’s, whose portraits are much less technically proficient but are windows into the soul of the sitter.

The friends start making enquiries, and find that Peter has been to see his old professor, Paul Massey, who taught Peter and Clara at the Ontario College of Canadian Arts. Professor Massey is well-liked by the students—he is a kindly man, known for being a mentor to young artists. Clara remembers a messianic young professor, Sébastien Norman—he believed in a tenth muse, the muse of painting (it’s odd, there isn’t a muse for painting among the nine). Massey thought Norman was unstable and fired him. Norman has disappeared—the only sign of him is a painting in the school yearbook of a crazed man. Is it a self-portrait?

Eventually, the child of Peter’s sister Marianna shows them paintings that turn out to be ones that Peter made during the year he was on his own. The paintings break every rule, are wild and not very good. It feels like he was going against everything that had been important to him. What was Peter trying to say? Were they are reflection of his mind, an indication that he has gone off the rails or was he trying to tap into something deep inside himself?

Clara, Myrna, Armand and Jean-Guy track Peter down to the mouth of the St. Lawrence river, a place that is so wild and inhospitable that the mariners called it the land God gave to Cain. There they find that Norman, calling himself No Man, had set up an arts community in the woods, and that Peter had followed him there. What happened in this wild place?

This is a slow-burning story. Unlike most whodunits, there is no body to kick things off. There is, instead, an exploration into identity and what lies beneath the surface. There is a “sin-sick soul” but it isn’t clear who that is until the end. I found this an absorbing and rewarding book. It’s one of a series Penny has written about Armand Ganache. I’m going to look for more of these.