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The Predicament by William Boyd (Viking, £20)
A second adventure for amateur spy Gabriel Dax, first seen in Boyd’s 2024 novel Gabriel’s Moon. It’s early 1963, and Dax, a travel writer, is in his Sussex cottage working on his latest book, struggling with emotional baggage and yearning for his MI6 handler and sometime girlfriend, Faith Green. She persuades him to go to Guatemala to check out the popular leftwing leader who is threatening to topple the country’s CIA-backed government, but Dax is forced to flee when things go seriously awry. He ends up being sent to West Berlin to gather intelligence on a possible assassin, whose arrival in West Germany just before the visit of US president John F Kennedy may not be coincidental. Beautifully crafted, with echoes of le Carré, Greene and Forsyth, this is a superb evocation of a vanished world, seen through the eyes of a relatably hapless accidental hero.
The Killer Question by Janice Hallett (Viper, £18.99)
Hallett’s latest centres on that staple of British social life, the pub quiz, and like its predecessors it’s told in emails, WhatsApp messages, texts and transcripts. We know from the start that things haven’t gone well for pub landlords Sue and Mal Eastwood: their nephew is pitching a true crime documentary to Netflix, promising “intrigue, tension, betrayal, deception and … murder”. Rewind to five years earlier: Sue and Mal, desperate to keep their struggling business afloat, are pleased at the arrival of a new quiz team. However, the Shadow Knights proceed to sweep the board every week, prompting accusations of cheating. So far, so nerdy – but when the body of someone already outed as a quiz cheat is discovered in a nearby river, things take a darker turn. Some suspension of disbelief is necessary – why Sue and Mal chose to communicate via WhatsApp rather than talking to each other is unclear – but Hallett is a master of misdirection, and this plot is up there with her fiendishly clever best.
The Impossible Fortune by Richard Osman (Viking, £22)
The fifth novel in Osman’s bestselling Thursday Murder Club series sees crime-solving pensioners Elizabeth, Joyce, Ibrahim and Ron engaging with secret codes, drug dealers, impecunious aristocrats and cryptocurrency, with assistance from former cocaine queenpin Connie, friendly cop Donna, Bogdan the handyman and Ron’s clever nine-year-old grandson. Although still grieving for her husband, Elizabeth steps up when Nick, the best man at Joyce’s daughter’s wedding, confides that somebody is trying to kill him. Nick and his business partner Holly own a high-security storage facility and once accepted a payment in bitcoin, the value of which has risen to £350m. They want to cash out, but the money is protected by two codes, and as Nick and Holly have one each, neither can access it alone. When Nick disappears, the quartet gets on the case. The central mystery is a satisfactory head-scratcher, but the true pleasure is a gently humorous read, peopled with characters who feel like old friends.
59 Minutes by Holly Seddon (Orion, £10.99)
Seddon’s seventh novel is a high-concept, inhale-at-a-sitting tour de force. On a Friday afternoon in November, the announcement of an imminent nuclear strike on southern England – just 59 minutes until impact – causes instant chaos. The public are told to seek immediate shelter, but Carrie, stuck in a crowd of panicked commuters at Waterloo station, is desperate to get home to her family. Frankie and Otis, on a romantic minibreak in Devon, are trying to find enough supplies to sustain them until it’s safe to leave their rented cottage, but the queue at the local store soon degenerates into a melee, with worse to follow. As the clock ticks down, Seddon paints a terrifyingly convincing picture of what happens when everything we take for granted breaks down in a matter of seconds, as well as creating characters you’ll be rooting for and keeping up a breakneck pace with a plot that twists, turns, and – without giving too much away – somersaults back on itself.
Deadman’s Pool by Kate Rhodes (Orenda, £9.99)
The eighth novel in Rhodes’s splendid series set on the Isles of Scilly begins when DI Ben Kitto’s dog discovers the remains of an emaciated girl on the uninhabited island of St Helen’s. Kitto and his colleagues are baffled: no one has been reported missing, and rumours about rich islanders being involved in a people-smuggling conspiracy are dismissed as the imaginings of bored schoolkids. Kitto’s narrative is interspersed with that of Mai, a Vietnamese girl who is being held captive in a basement, alone now that her younger sister and her baby – the result of rape by her captor – have been taken away. And when a tiny baby is found abandoned at the police station, the race is on to find the mother before it’s too late. An atmospheric and moving depiction of a tightly knit community in a rugged and often dangerous landscape, Deadman’s Pool is tense and deftly plotted, the pathos fuelling true suspense.
