John Banville’s Strafford and Quirke return, although lesser characters almost steal the show – The Irish Times

Yasmin Ango Not what she seems (Thomas and Mercer, £8.99) is a mystery driven by regret and revenge. It begins with Montavius ​​Brody, a former police detective in the small South Carolina town of Brook Haven, facing the consequences of his online investigation: “He wished and hoped that one day the getaway would come knocking. And they did it. As he loses consciousness, his last thoughts are with his granddaughter Jacques, who has not set foot in their hometown since her father’s death six years earlier. The skills that young Jacques acquired playing armchair detective with her grandfather soon found unexpected uses.

When Jack returns to Brook Haven, she discovers that Moor Manor, a centuries-old estate-turned-abandoned hospital near the site of her father’s death and “the place from which most of the horrors of Brook Haven’s children were born”, is being transformed into a getaway from newcomer Fay Arden. Jack quickly senses that Faye is more (and worse) than the social gentrifier and do-gooder that almost everyone else sees.

A family romance steeped in Southern Gothic elements and centered around Jack and Faye’s cat-and-mouse dance, Not What She Seems builds slowly until revelations lead to a violent conclusion. “Big things rarely happen in small towns,” Jacques reflects, “but when something did happen, it was like an explosion.” Building on her well-received series about an elite assassin, Ango has created a gripping thriller for this new standalone series.

Gene Hanff Korelitz Continuation (Faber, £9.99) envelops intrigue with a biting satire of the publishing world. This character-driven thriller picks up where Korelitz’s bestselling The Plot ends, but it stands on its own. Book lovers will find the novel’s narrator, literary widow and new author Anne Williams-Bonner, delightfully cynical. Veiled in public by her widow’s weeds, Anne’s acerbic and dry wit suggests the gleefully bleak payoffs of Patricia Highsmith or Liz Nugent characters.

The sequel begins after Anna’s husband, successful writer Jake Bonner, was accused of plagiarism and suddenly died. While publishing his latest book, she almost accidentally begins her own novel, emboldened by her apparent disdain for the writers she knows, including Jake: “If these idiots can do it, how damn hard can it be?”

Thanks to the support of Jake’s publishing team and the public outpouring of sympathy following his death, her novel became an immediate bestseller. There’s just one problem: like Jake before her, she begins receiving cryptic messages that threaten to expose not only his plagiarism, but her own buried secrets.

Anna’s cunning attempt to hide her past results in a fair amount of collateral damage as she analyzes various suspects. Korelitz skillfully keeps all the plates spinning as she builds to a wonderfully unexpected ending, deftly ensuring that the sequel will be gripping until the last page.

In the tension that vibrates throughout the opening of John Banville’s play, there is also some Highsmith and perhaps some Edward Albee. Drowned (Faber, £18.99), his fourth Strafford and Quirke mystery after seven Quirke novels published as Benjamin Black. Denton Wimes is walking home along the Wicklow coast when he is stopped by Ronnie Armitage, whose wife Deirdre (he says) drove out into a field and then disappeared towards the sea. They head to a nearby house for help, where Charles and Charlotte Ruddock bristle with nervous anger as the evening becomes increasingly unsettling.

( What do Irish writers read? Donal Ryan, Mark Tay, Nuala O’Connor, Claire Hennessy and others provide recommendations.Opens in a new window )

Many of the highlights of The Drowned come from these supporting characters and their dangerous sides. (Some of them return from “Imprisonment” and recount the events of the novel; although the two novels can be read independently, they are richer together.)

The dominant atmosphere of Quirke’s books – “Everything was hazy, wistful, tinged with melancholy” – eventually comes to the surface, as does Quirke and his daughter Phoebe, who now has a difficult relationship with Detective Inspector Strafford. Strafford investigates Deirdre’s disappearance, from which everything else follows: this is Dublin, where everyone knows everyone, and so it inevitably turns out that “there’s more to this than meets the eye.”

The writing is as distinctive as Banville’s readers have come to expect, and Quirke, Strafford and Phoebe live up to his usual high standards. However, Wimes, Armitage and the Raddoxes come close enough to steal the show, and it makes you wonder what pleasures can be derived from a novel given entirely to them.

Although it’s being billed as something of a standalone project, Will Dean’s film Ice town (Hodder, £20) is his sixth novel featuring deaf Swedish journalist Tuva Moudison. “Did you know that these little hunting dogs are sent into holes to catch rats?” she asks someone. “I’m one of those.” When Peter Hedberg, a young deaf man, goes missing in the remote northern town of Esseberg, Tuva, knowing his vulnerability all too well, sets out to help find him.

Before she can do this, other people start turning up dead. Someone is killing local residents, but no one sees a common thread, although in “a small and isolated town like Esseberg, they must be connected in some way.” The contours of the case are changing under Tuva’s feet, and the city is becoming more and more suspicious and fearful. This tension is heightened by Esseberg’s gothic, mountainous geography: high above is an eerily crumbling grand hotel, the town accessible only through a tunnel that is closed at night, preventing people from entering or entering.

Dean sets the stage for all this so vividly that the resolution of the case, when it comes, becomes almost an afterthought. Tuva is a stunning storyteller with an appealingly caustic voice and a deep moral commitment to the profession of journalism. Esseberg’s dangerously wintry landscape deserves equal praise, its claustrophobic atmosphere pressing ever harder on everyone as the death toll rises and fears in the town escalate.

Every fall brings a variety of Christmas mysteries, from the cozy to the cruel. Much less common are stories about Hanukkah, such as those collected by Todd Goldberg in Eight Very Bad Nights: The Hanukkah Noir Collection (Soho, £26.99), although his 11 stories, written by an eclectic group of crime writers, still offer plenty of traditional noir mayhem.

Standouts include Ivy Pohoda’s Johnny Christmas and JR Angelella’s Mi Shebeirach. Pohoda’s meticulous story approaches the sentimental moments only to cut through them before the cliché can take hold. Johnny Christmas, the name Mikey Goldfarb adopted after he served time in the Brooklyn Detention Center for hitting his grandmother’s landlord, was known in prison as the “dead-eyed nerd.” Those eyes haven’t changed now that he’s gone, and the point of this story is to find out what dimmed their shine in the first place.

A Jewish prayer for healing gives the title to Angelella’s Mi Shebeirach, a moving story that, for all its sensitivity, still embraces the harshest edges of noir. To keep her drug-addicted husband supplied, former getaway driver Molly Blaze reluctantly returns to work for Slavi, a Baltimore crime lord who sends her to steal a briefcase from Gershom Fox. Things go wrong once Fox refuses to hand him over, but he ends up giving her even more wealth.

Other highlights include Liska Jacob’s Dead Weight, a darkly witty tale of history, the supernatural and rent, and Nikki Dolson’s heartbreaking Come Let’s Kiss and Part, which echoes excellent recent American noir such as Broiler. Eli Cranora. It all makes for a welcome departure from the usual holiday fare.

Elizabeth Mannion and Brian Cliff – critics