With an elegantly brutal opening scene, Jane Casey\u2019s Everything She Didn\u2019t Say (Hemlock, \u00a316.99) launches a cast of characters who play mind games as if they were born to it. This perfectly titled mystery is a surprising and at times darkly comic chess match full of satisfying twists and turns.<\/p>\n
Something horrible has clearly happened in Shadow House, a high-end \u201creimagined Irish cottage\u201d on a cliff overlooking the Atlantic. It had most recently been occupied by Maura Ellender and Ruth O\u2019Rourke, but now Maura is missing and Ruth has been found speechless, \u201ccovered in someone else\u2019s blood\u201d.<\/p>\n
Dublin detectives Ben Butler and Liam Farrell have little to go on when they get the case. Despite their urgent need to hear Ruth\u2019s story, it\u2019s hard to argue with her shocked silence under the apparent circumstances. When they do get her talking, solutions somehow always seem to hover just slightly out of reach. With her characteristic balance of character work and tight plotting, O\u2019Casey builds Ben and Liam\u2019s prickly friendship as they keep chasing those elusive answers.<\/p>\n
Everything She Didn\u2019t Say brings a Hitchcockian flair \u2013 think the tone and plotting of Strangers on a Train \u2013 to a contemporary Ireland marked by Casey\u2019s eye for dry social observation (one witness \u201chad been waiting her entire life to help the Garda\u00ed and she wasn\u2019t going to miss out on a minute of it\u201d). Everything pops with a skilled glee, making this a novel to remember.<\/p>\n
A house with a past \u2013 several pasts, really \u2013 lends a Golden Age flair to Catherine Ryan Howard\u2019s Buyer Beware (Bantam, \u00a320), the best of her recent work. With its perfect twist hiding in plain sight, this clever thriller manages to connect unhappy romantic choices, the fluctuating property market, true crime obsessives and \u201ca human stain\u201d beneath an old dirty carpet, all without missing a beat.<\/p>\n
One Delaney Row, a small house tucked away just off Dundrum\u2019s Main Street, seems like it offers the ideal location for Ellie to attempt a fresh start, but that start depends on her ability to keep a number of secrets well hidden. Her plan is immediately threatened when someone keeps breaking into her new home. But who is it?<\/p>\n
Almost as distressingly, the neighbourhood WhatsApp group proves far too curious for her comfort, as does The Murder House Club, a small band of domestic crime-scene enthusiasts with an eye for her house and the \u201cvarious tragedies\u201d that \u201chave befallen a string of previous owners going all the way back to 1968\u201d. The home where Ellie hoped to hide is, to her dismay, now \u201ca morbid tourist attraction\u201d.<\/p>\n
Ellie\u2019s chapters alternate with Erin\u2019s story, which begins some years earlier at secondary school in Cork when she meets Jason, then follows her life as it gradually shrinks to suit him. With Howard\u2019s usual wit, Buyer Beware gradually weaves Ellie\u2019s and Erin\u2019s strands together, tapping into something much more resonant than this suburban home\u2019s deceptively nondescript facade would suggest.<\/p>\n
Set in contemporary South Korea, Minyoung Kang\u2019s Plant Lady (Doubleday, \u00a314.99) is wonderfully surprising, as Kang\u2019s disarmingly discreet prose (well translated by Shanna Tan) lures the reader into a story much less genteel than it first seems. <\/p>\n
The novel revolves around Yoohee\u2019s boutique plant store, which becomes a destination for local women. Yoohee\u2019s no average florist: she\u2019s more intimate with her plants than with people, and guards them vigilantly. When her first male customer petulantly attacks her favoured palm, she wields her shovel in its defence, with bloody results. Though Kang skips right to Yoohee healing the palm, it\u2019s clear that customer becomes fertiliser for the shop\u2019s garden. <\/p>\n
He isn\u2019t her last batch of fertiliser: Yoohee soon realises some clients require more help than they know with the men in their lives. As her particular brand of aid becomes a whispered secret among the women who need it most, and men begin disappearing, an ambitious detective grows suspicious. While Plant Lady flirts with cat-and-mouse suspense, the focus remains on Yoohee, a memorable protagonist whose anger at what men do to women is all the sharper for being so closely held. <\/p>\n
Kang makes Yoohee\u2019s story \u2013 told with the driest of wit and a sly psychological build \u2013 a terrifically satisfying read, not like anything else this year. In a moment when much crime writing concerns itself with the same rage Yoohee channels, Kang\u2019s slim, spare novel stands out with remarkable clarity. <\/p>\n
Gary Phillips warmly acknowledges the debt his terrific The Haul (Soho, \u00a325.99) owes to Donald Westlake\u2019s classic Parker novels. Shifting between protagonist O\u2019Conner\u2019s origin story and his later leadership of an epic heist targeting a tech billionaire, this is no dutiful homage. Instead, The Haul delivers savvy old-school thievery and giddily hectic plotting with charm and considerable violence.<\/p>\n
Stuck in a children\u2019s home after his grandmother died, O\u2019Conner decided that \u201che wouldn\u2019t be anchored by the past\u201d. Watching neighbourhood bar owner Charlie Mack forced to navigate local gang leaders only made him more driven to leave South Central Los Angeles. Thanks to some good fortune, he does just that.<\/p>\n
Decades later, O\u2019Conner is a semi-retired elite thief living a quiet suburban life with his partner Gwen. When he\u2019s pitched a big heist by Charlie Mack\u2019s niece, Mavis, O\u2019Conner decides he has one more job in him. With an old pro\u2019s ease, O\u2019Conner assembles a team who harbour few romantic notions about the risks their work requires. Although a civilian, Mavis works alongside them, her skills essential every step of the way. As O\u2019Conner comes to understand, \u201cbeing black and a woman in tech … she\u2019d no doubt had to deal with plenty of minefields\u201d.<\/p>\n
When it comes to storytelling, Phillips is just as much a pro as his protagonist. Here\u2019s hoping we see more of both.<\/p>\n
A note-perfect noir set in 1943 Mexico, Silvia Moreno-Garcia\u2019s marvellous The Intrigue (Quercus, \u00a322) glitters from the first line to the last while its characters are battered by thwarted dreams, secret shames and overwhelming desires. <\/p>\n
The Intrigue opens on Ulises, a second-generation grifter reduced to running cons through the lonely hearts correspondence pages of cheap magazines. Dodging one scheme\u2019s fallout in Mexico City, he finds his next target on a fading Veracruz estate. There, fiercely guarding both her much-diminished fortune and her claims on respectability, middle-aged Perla\u2019s running a boarding house (but loan sharking on the side). Her orphaned niece In\u00e9s is a vibrant young woman withering in Perla\u2019s clutches, more servant than relative. In\u00e9s quickly sees through Ulises and demands they work together: if she helps him seduce and defraud Perla, they\u2019ll split the proceeds. <\/p>\n
Because everyone here has secrets, nothing goes as smoothly as In\u00e9s and Ulises hoped. That\u2019s a classic noir plot \u2013 shades of Mildred Pierce, Double Indemnity, The Postman Always Rings Twice \u2013 sharpened by a compellingly gothic sense of all the ways that family legacies warp and distort.<\/p>\n