Thrillers of the month: diagnosis murder

In the time-honoured fashion of the likes of Richard Osman and Bob Mortimer, Adam Kay (pictured), the doctor turned author who gave us the devastating and darkly hilarious memoir of life as a junior doctor This Is Going to Hurt, has turned to crime fiction. In his debut novel, A Particularly Nasty Case (Orion), Kay follows the travails of Eitan Rose, a consultant at the fictional London hospital of St Jude’s, back at work after a serious mental health episode and detesting how he is being obsessively monitored by his unpleasant boss, Douglas Moran. Eitan has a heart of gold but leads a chaotic life: he visits a sex club in Vauxhall in the book’s opening chapters, and spends his first day at work hungover and texting Cole, a handsome porter he meets on the roof. And when Moran dies of a heart attack, he refuses to believe it’s not suspicious. The trouble is, Eitan is bipolar, and both management and his friends (and new boyfriend Cole) think he is spiralling into a manic episode. Is he? Or is Morgan’s death, rapidly followed by the passing of another senior doctor, as suspicious as Eitan believes? “There are writers on Doctor Who who’d flag that as too far-fetched,” as Eitan puts it. Just as he has done in his nonfiction, Kay gives a biting and bleakly comic look at the reality of life as a doctor in the NHS. There’s a lot of humour here – if anything there are rather too many comic asides – and Eitan is a complex and appealing “Poundshop Poirot”, as he puts it.

What a brilliant idea. Adele Parks made her name with her excellent romantic fiction. In Our Beautiful Mess (HQ), she takes characters from two previous novels, Playing Away and Young Wives’ Tales, and throws them into a domestic suspense tale with marvellous effect. Connie can’t wait to have all three of her young adult daughters home in Notting Hill for Christmas. So far, so romantic novel, but then her eldest, Fran, announces she’s pregnant, and Connie realises that Fran’s new partner, Zac, reminds her horribly of the man she had a devastating affair with years ago. Things spiral quickly out of control, as Zac’s secret life puts everyone in danger, and soon this Notting Hill mother has to see how far she’ll go to keep her family safe. “She couldn’t remember why she might have thought an unexpected pregnancy was anything other than brilliant news; her family growing was a wonderful thing. Far better than this threat of it shrinking. Disappearing.” I love how Parks has thrown her romantic fiction characters into the heart of a thriller – but you don’t need to know of Connie’s previous exploits to enjoy this; it stands alone, and is a great read.

The Empty Cradle by Lisa Rookes (Orion) is a deliciously chilling, Rosemary’s Baby-esque thriller, set in a Yorkshire village that is strangely difficult to leave. Amy ends up there after she discovers her husband, Joel, is having an affair with her best friend. She is renovating a dilapidated cottage to turn it into an Airbnb when she is taken under the wing of a local book group. These women want to be her friend – particularly when they discover she is pregnant. If I were Amy, I would have left when I started getting strange offerings of various bits of offal left in my post box, and certainly when my surveillance camera showed weird movements and visitors late at night. But she sticks it out, and things get creepier and creepier. Rookes has a lot of fun with local legends and superstitions as her story builds, and I had a lot of fun following the plot to its inevitable climax.

Conman turned lawyer Eddie Flynn is up against perhaps his toughest opponent yet in Steve Cavanagh’s Two Kinds of Stranger (Headline): a sadistic but ingenious sociopath out to take him down. Cavanagh opens with social media star Ellie Parker discovering live on camera that her husband is cheating on her with her best friend. When they both end up dead, she then finds that she’s been framed for the murders. She turns to Eddie as the only person who might be able to help her – but as he gets involved in the case, the sociopath who’s after Ellie turns his eyes to Eddie and his family, and suddenly they’re all in danger. There is a great pleasure to watching someone be clever and cunning as they face up to baddies, and that’s what we get with Eddie: a good heart, few scruples, and plenty of thrills and spills on the way to the denouement.

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Photograph of Adam Kay by Andy Hall for The Observer