Crime and thrillers of the month: blood and sand

Sophie Hannah is a versatile and brilliant crime writer (she’s also a poet, but I know less about that). Whether she’s continuing the high jinks of Hercule Poirot or writing deeply suspenseful and insightful modern-day thrillers, she is always a delight to read. Her latest, No One Would Do What the Lamberts Have Done (Bedford Square Publishers), is something rather different. Ostensibly the story of an incident with a dog in an idyllic Cambridgeshire village, it is packed with narrators and tales within tales (“Yes, I am currently withholding a few important facts,” we are told at one point). I was pleased to be given the strong hint by one character, referring to Mary Westmacott’s The Rose and the Yew Tree: “It is a murder story, but almost no one will spot it, which makes it so much more sinister and dark … you have to read to the very last lines to catch a glimpse of the truth.”

But back to that incident. After making our way through various layers of storytelling, we arrive at the house of Sally Lambert as she is informed by a police officer that something terrible has happened. Sally is quite the invention by Hannah, the sort of person who thinks that “the way to show a house you loved it was by giving it a nickname” and that “being the parent of a dog is exactly the same and every bit as meaningful and amazing as being a parent of humans”. Despite initial reservations, I ended up rather charmed by her, and by the humour of this tale, as neighbour is pitted against neighbour, and any sort of proportional behaviour is thrown out of the window.

Kash owes a lot of money to a bunch of bad people. His New York restaurant, which serves rare and exotic meats to the city’s elite, has fallen on hard times, and now loan shark Boris wants his money back. But Kash has heard of a billionaires’ club in search of unprecedented dining experiences. Can he come up with something exotic enough to whet their appetites, something they’ve never tasted before? We know from the start where K Anis Ahmed’s Carnivore (HarperCollins) is going. The fun is in watching it get there, as Kash moves from sourcing peacocks for a Kazakh billionaire, to having his finger chopped off by the aforementioned loan shark and coming up with a darkly brilliant idea to serve “the rarest cut of all”. As Ahmed writes: “No one thinks it’s going to go that far, until it does.”

Carnivore is a debut and it does feel like it at times; Ahmed has a tendency to overwrite, with Kash’s girlfriend Helen most likely to be the recipient of various flowery phrases: “her blonde curls fell in lush but ruffled plenitude on her shoulders”; “her eyes an opalescent pair of wonder”. The novel is at its best when this is held in check and the author’s deliciously dark, sardonic humour shines through. “They say, you call a friend when you need to move, and you call your best friend when you need to move a body. Here was a variant of that rule: when you need to deliver a cooked human finger, you called up a fucking Desi brother.”

Adventure thrillers are my favourite, and Amy McCulloch’s Runner 13 (Michael Joseph), drawing on the author’s own experience of running the Marathon des Sables in the Sahara desert, promised to be a corker. It’s set during a new event, the “Hot & Sandy”: a 250-mile self-sufficient race through the desert in Morocco, run by the mysterious “Boones”, whose races are all invitation-only, all dangerous, and all rarely finished. “This is the ultimate display of human endurance and suffering and triumph over adversity,” we’re told, as we follow the race of Adrienne, a now-vilified former running champion who has been out of the game for some time after a disturbing accident. “Maybe throwing myself into the world’s toughest race as my ‘comeback’ after seven years away wasn’t the best idea,” she thinks at one point. Well, indeed, especially when you throw a killer into the mix, chasing her down across the hot sand. I loved the running elements of this thriller – woman (and man) pitted against the landscape in an insane test of their capabilities; the descriptions of the desert in all its killing glory. The mystery elements all got a little too tangled for me – too many threads – but overall this was a thrilling race to the finish.

Sarah Pinborough, whose Behind Her Eyes was a huge hit, is back with We Live Here Now (Orion) to bring another slice of the supernatural to the thriller genre. Emily has just woken from a coma after an accident that nearly killed her. She and her husband, Freddie, decide to move to the moors of Devon as she recuperates. Their new home is remote and beautiful, but strange things start happening almost immediately – smells that only Emily is aware of, shifts in temperature, books moving around. And then there’s that room on the second floor that Emily can’t bear to go into… Emily wonders if she has a brain tumour, or post-sepsis syndrome. Or is the house actually haunted? Pinborough is very good at writing genuinely chilling stories; the trappings of We Live Here Now might be your classic haunted house tropes, but she fills them with enough fresh dread that I was feeling genuinely nervous going up to bed after finishing this late one night, checking doors and windows and looking behind me on the stairs.

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