Black Widow
Chris Brookmyre
Abacus, March 2017
The latest installment in the Brookmyre's Jack Parlabane thriller series has just picked up its second accolade. Lauded as the novel that "the cements [Brookmyre's] place in the pantheon of great crime writers", it won crime novel of the year at the Theakston Old Peculier crime writing festival held in the United Kingdom last week. In it, the maverick reporter Parlabane investigates the death of a young man who was developing a potentially lucrative and disruptive software programme, whose body cannot be found. Was he the victim of his wife, a surgeon with a controversial online persona? "Even the twists have twists," the judging panel declared when Black Widow won the McIvanney Prize at the Bloody Scotland festival last autumn.
Into the Water
Paula Hawkins
Doubleday, May 2017
It was always going to be tough to follow the huge success of Hawkins' The Girl on the Train, which sold in vast numbers and was given the Hollywood movie treatment, and reviews of Into the Water have been mixed. For her fans, however, the story of a single mother who turns up dead, the latest victim to be dredged from the river that runs through the old Mill House, will be a satisfying read. Hawkins is once again skilled at recounting the inner lives of her characters: a lonely 15-year-old girl left in the care of her dead mother's sister who never wanted to step foot in her home town again.
Prague Nights
Benjamin Black
Viking, June
John Banville turns out another thrilling and atmospheric who dunnit under as his alter ego Benjamin Black, who is well-known writing the adventures of Quirke, a pathologist working in 1950s Dublin.This time Black turns the clock much further back to a 16th-century Prague, which is deep in snow, for a mystery with royal connections. When Christian Stern stumbles over the damaged body of the mistress of the Holy Roman Emperor, Rudolph II, he is arrested and imprisoned upon suspicion of her murder. A royal pardon sets him free and lets him into the emperor's inner circle where the young doctor is charged with apprehending her killer. A fun read for those willing to indulge Black in his historical fantasy and suspend their disbelief.
