Review | Four of the latest crime fiction books to give you a ‘reliable nightmare or two’

The Island

By Adrian McKinty

Little Brown, 384 pages, $38

For years, the gifted Belfast crime novelist Adrian McKinty wrote terrific police procedurals which, despite their high quality, didn’t achieve regular best-sellerdom. Then in 2019, he switched gears and, with “The Chain,” he produced a conventional but brilliantly conceived commercial thriller. It was a smash hit, selling in 30 languages and, as he says in his new book’s “Acknowledgments,” rescued him from a career as an Uber driver. Now, no dummy, he’s written a second thriller of the same sort as “The Chain.” This one tells the sweaty adventure story of an American family of four who, as tourists in Australia, fall victim to the Aussie equivalent of ruthless hillbillies. The action is frenetic and relentless, hardly the literary equivalent of McKinty’s early books, but entirely satisfying if you’re looking for a reliable nightmare or two.

Take Your Breath Away

By Linwood Barclay

William Morrow, 368 pages, $34.99

Everybody in the Connecticut town, including the chief cop on the case, Inspector Marissa Hardy, figures Andrew bumped off his wife Brie. It isn’t that Hardy, an officer with tunnel vision, has turned up a body. But Brie has been missing for six years now, and her family has been pushing so hard for a murder charge against Andrew that the town is pretty much agreed on him as the guilty party — despite the lack of evidence against him. Andrew, meanwhile, a contractor by trade, gets on as best he can and even moves in with a new girlfriend. Then, a couple of fresh developments in perhaps the most complex and unsettling of Linwood Barclay’s oeuvre so far tip the case towards resolution. Naturally it’s nothing the readers could ever have anticipated.

The Murder Rule

By Dervla McTiernan

William Morrow, 304 pages, $34.99

Readers know from the start that Hannah the law student is working a secret agenda. She’s conned her way on to an elite team of lawyers in Virginia on the Innocence Project, a group whose aim is to spring from prison a man who was convicted eleven years earlier for a murder he and the Project insist he didn’t commit. It soon becomes clear that Hannah has ties to the murder that take her beyond legal connections. All of this is handled to maximum impact by Dervla McTiernan with the minor reservation that her Australian background and sensibilities occasionally nudge her into steps that don’t ring entirely true in an American milieu.

Cold Canadian Crime

Edited by Taija Morgan

Crime Writers of Canada, 330 pages, $18.99

There’s not a dud in this annual collection of 21 short crime stories written by members of Crime Writers of Canada. It’s also not at all surprising that of the 21 stories, all but three of the pieces are written by women, who have dominated the Canadian crime genre in recent years. Consistent all the way through, whether the writers are veterans of the short form or newcomers, is a consistently clever and assured approach to plotting. Every time a character appears to have misplaced a clue or dropped a giveaway line, the offending writer regroups herself. The book is full of such smart recoveries, providing evidence that in this collection, the authors remain insistently a step in front of us readers.

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