A couple’s desperate search for their child – plus the horrors of a coma patient in Korea’s answer to Stephen King
First, a warning. Do not start Lisa Jewell’s Don’t Let Him In (Century) if you have anything else to do for the next few days, because it is the sort of dash-through-it-in-one-read thriller that will steal every minute of your time. It features a stunningly awful antagonist – a man with a “full head of thick white hair”, “piercing blue-grey eyes” and a horribly creepy propensity to prey on women, slowly siphoning away their assets while they fall for him. Secretly, he loathes them for their vulnerability.
We know him as Nick but he goes by many names, and Jewell moves around in time as she reveals the web of lies he has built in the name of furthering his own cause. “What is it with some women? I really don’t get it. Why can’t they see through men like him? What is it that he does? It’s like… black magic. Like that character from that sketch show, you know, Look into the eyes, not around the eyes, look into the eyes.” Luckily, not all the women are taken in by him, and Jewell gives us a worthy adversary to Nick in Ash, the daughter of recent widow Nina, who doesn’t believe everything this new man of her mother’s is telling them.
Jewell has written a number of good thrillers since she abandoned more romantically inclined fiction, and this one is the best of a great bunch. I loved it, but also found it extremely stressful waiting to see if Nick gets his comeuppance.
Liam McIlvanney has won prizes for his writing and his latest crime novel, The Good Father (Zaffre), shows why. It is narrated by a father, Gordon Rutherford, who lives with his wife, Sarah, and son, Rory, in a house by the beach on the Ayrshire coast. He’s an academic, writing a book about Scottish ballads. All is good in his world, until the day Bonnie, the family labrador, comes in from the beach with one of Rory’s shoes. “This is the moment when everything changed, when the beach stopped being a backdrop, an element of scenery, and became the place where Rory went missing.”
Alice has something that Mina wants – an inherited flat in a fancy area of London
Gordon recounts the increasingly desperate search for his seven-year-old (“I remember bristling even then at how the Rory-ness of Rory, his bright, laughing, non-stop self, was being flattened into a checklist of features”), the fading hope as the days pass, the efforts he and Sarah make after the police investigation loses steam. McIlvanney is an intelligent, insightful writer, and thisIt’s a moving and absorbing dive into grief and love, and how far a parent would go to save their child.
Korean bestseller Hye-Young Pyun’s The Hole (Doubleday) – translated by Sora Kim-Russell and winner of the Shirley Jackson award – is sold on its cover as “a Korean take on Misery”; catnip to a reader like me, but I’m not sure the novel lives up to this pitch. It’s the story of Oghi, who wakes from a coma after a car accident. He’s in a hospital bed, he can’t speak or move (so far, so Stephen King), and Pyun does a good and disturbing job of portraying the horrors of this locked world: how Oghi can’t ask what’s happened to his wife, who was in the car with him, or find out anything other than what the doctors tell him. Things get worse when he’s sent home with his mother-in-law, and while she doesn’t go full-on Annie Wilkes, let’s just say that she may not have his best interests at heart.
The horror and the thrills do ramp up towards the end of this short novel, but much of it is a thoughtful and elegant exploration of a relationship, as we learn about how Oghi and his wife ended up in the car that day. That’s not a criticism – it is all well done, and increasingly unnerving, but don’t expect Misery.
Alice is a publishing intern desperate to land a full-time job and make her way in a world very different to the one in which she was raised. Mina, her boss, is married to an MP and loaded with money. But Alice has something Mina wants – an inherited flat in a fancy area of London, and Mina is prepared to pay Alice to use it for the night.
That’s the premise of Lily Samson’s Watch Me Watch You (Century), but all sorts of other threads come into this story of lust and sex and money and violence. Rather too many, in fact. It all becomes a little too tangled and, in my opinion, people should be more concerned about who might have been in their home when their parrot suddenly learns to say “murderer”. A fun, if somewhat convoluted, read.
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