The best recent thrillers – review roundup
Watch Her Fall
Erin Kelly
Hodder & Stoughton, £14.99, pp400
Watch Her Fall opens with a quote from the American dancer Martha Graham: “A dancer dies twice – once when they stop dancing, and this first death is the more painful.” Ava Kirilova has landed the role of Odette and Odile, the white and the black swan, in Swan Lake – “one of the most coveted in all ballet”, one for which dancers “would kill”. The lead ballerina at the London Russian Ballet Company, which is headed by her terrifyingly strict father, she is at the peak of her career – but she is 30, and she can hear the whispers from the younger dancers: “It’s all a bit now-or-never, isn’t it? The beginning of the end?” Kelly paints a picture of a claustrophobic, rarefied, piercingly lonely world, one where those below Ava in the hierarchy watch with glee for her downfall. Certainly not just one for balletomanes (as I have now learned ballet enthusiasts are called), this is deliciously sinister and obsessive, an immersive journey into a world where ballet is everything, with one hell of a twist.
Tall Bones
Anna Bailey
Doubleday, £12.99, pp352
“I’ll be fine,” Abigail Blake tells her best friend, Emma, as she leaves the party in the woods. “I’ll just call a cab or something. I’ll figure it out.” But 17-year-old Abigail never comes home. Anna Bailey’s debut novel is set in remote, small-town Colorado, in the close-knit community of Whistling Ridge, rocked by the disappearance of Abigail. There’s Dolly, Abigail’s mother, dabbing concealer on to her 12-year-old son Jude’s face to hide the bruises put there by his father; Noah, Abigail’s older brother, suffused with resentment because he never got to leave Whistling Ridge; Emma, who is drinking more and more in an attempt to block out reality. Then there’s the outsider Rat, who Emma saw with Abigail that night. Bailey shifts her story back and forth in time, to the period when Abigail was still, vibrantly, alive, and to the weeks after she vanished, when Emma, not trusting the local police, is digging into what really happened that night, and when Whistling Ridge, ruled over by its church, is on the edge of tipping over into violence. This is a striking first novel, a chilling insight into an oppressive world, where bad thoughts and bad deeds ripple just below the surface, out of sight.
The Others
Sarah Blau (translated by Daniella Zamir)
Pushkin Vertigo, £12.99, pp240
Women are being murdered in Tel Aviv, found tied to a chair with a baby doll glued to their hands, the word “mother” emblazoned on their foreheads. Sheila, Sarah Blau’s narrator, thinks she knows what’s going on – she used to be friends with the women, and they made a pact at university never to have children, a decision she continues to wrestle with today. “It’s something private and profound, which slowly boils in the depths of your consciousness before simmering to the surface, and even then it won’t stop fighting you till your very last egg dries up.” As Sheila gives a lecture at the Bible museum where she works, a woman harangues her: “Who doesn’t want to be a mother?” “They all want the same thing, for you to be like them, to settle down, make babies, save yourself, themselves, the country, it won’t kill you,” Sheila says. “Maybe it won’t kill you, maybe you’ll just wish it did.” Sharp-tongued and sardonic, Sheila is an enjoyably unreliable narrator, misleading the young detective who comes to question her about her old friend Dina’s death, accidentally letting him see a baby doll hidden in a box in her apartment. How much is she hiding, from herself and from the reader; is she in danger, or is she dangerous? The Others is the award-winner Blau’s fourth novel, but her first to be translated into English. Twisted, dark and fizzing with fury, it’s a lot of fun.
A Comedy of Terrors
Lindsey Davis
Hodder & Stoughton, £20, pp400
This is the latest in Lindsey Davis’s effortlessly brilliant Flavia Albia series, a spin-off from her hugely popular Marcus Didius Falco books. Albia is Falco’s adopted daughter, a private investigator in ancient Rome during the reign of Domitian, now also dealing with her motherless nephews after the death of her magistrate husband Tiberius’s sister. It’s the festival of Saturnalia, and Rome is gearing up for debauchery; Albia needs to find something to investigate, but pranks and butchered sheep aside, nothing much seems to be going on. “I needed devastated clients, insoluble rifts, frail women desperate for me to squeeze financial settlements from utter bastards whom they would never forgive.” Tiberius, however, fears someone nefarious is targeting the local nut sellers, and they get investigating. Lighthearted, witty and effortlessly clever, just like its wonderful heroine – “I always seem to be stumbling upon suspicious deaths, and since I don’t trust the vigils to investigate, I often knuckle down to it myself. A woman’s work is never done” – this is a window into ancient Rome, and a tonic and a joy to read.
• To order Watch Her Fall, Tall Bones, The Others or A Comedy of Terrors go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
