Murder

The central figure of The Family Man, the lawyer Alex Murdaugh (pronounced ‘Murdock’), spends his life getting implicated in so many heinous, melodramatic crimes that he seems cobbled together by a cabal of tabloid and commercial publishers, crime podcasters and providers of big budget cinematic sleaze. Memorably referred to by psychopathologists and public prosecutors as a ‘family annihilator’ (imagine a little bit of Medea, a little bit of the Menendez brothers and a whole lot of Oedipus Rex), he was arrested in 2021 for slaughtering his wife Maggie and their youngest son Paul with the same sort of high-tech military weaponry that he enjoyed wielding around his family compound to hunt hogs, and which visitors often found lying randomly about his home and gardens.

This book begins strangely. Kathryn Paige Harden and her man Travis go off into the Texas desert to take some LSD in the hope that it will provide a ‘hard serotonergic reboot’. They have not so far had sex, but Travis has plans. ‘You’ll come back with your third eye,’ he says, ‘and then we’ll fuck. You’ll be glad we waited.’ At this point you may be tempted to hurl the book across the room. The self-centredness is oppressive. But persist. It rapidly becomes a very powerful read. Harden is a psychologist and behavioural geneticist, and the primary theme of Original Sin is the way in which science raises questions about morality and the law. For example, is a psychotic man who murders his wife less guilty than a sane man who does so with a clear head?

David Keenan’s seventh novel is quite the ride, but its plot is not always easy to disentangle. The author has said that its title is his favourite word, and the book’s clearest narrative thread concerns the abduction of a young boy outside a Glasgow football ground in 1979. The boy’s older brother, Aaron, is subsequently guided by an angel called the Precious Gift. Aaron meets the guardian angel during a run for charity in 1986, on the last day of his boyhood, or so he thought, because he could never imagine doing a sponsored run again after that, because he got into literature and smoking pot straight afterwards.

Shortly after 9.30 a.m. on 13 March 1996, a man walked into the gymnasium at Dunblane Primary School, near Stirling, Scotland. He was armed with two 9mm Browning self-loading pistols, two .357 Smith & Wesson revolvers and 743 rounds of ammunition. Within three or four minutes, he’d fired 105 rounds, resulting in the deaths of a teacher, Gwen Mayor, and 16 children. A further three teaching staff and 14 children were injured. He then took his own life. It could have been a great deal worse.  There was a suspicion that he intended to kill most of the school’s 600 pupils but that he’d arrived a few minutes late for assembly, by which time most of the children had dispersed to their classrooms.

Our appetite for true crime is nothing new. The Victorians devoured it and, as Lottie Moggach’s fourth novel shows, they were as gawking and prone to erroneous judgments as any crowd on social media. Mrs Pearcey is about two women in 1890s London: sparky young Hannah Teale, engaged to a rising journalist on the Star and living with her widowed mother in Camden Square; and impoverished Mary Pearcey, who lodges in a Hampstead boarding house and is accused of the grotesque murder of a woman and her baby. It was a celebrated case in its day, coming soon after the Ripper murders, and it is now revived in Moggach’s vivid, immersive imagination. Part of the novel’s attraction lies in its setting in and around Camden Town.

Olivia Laing has had a productive couple of years. The Silver Book arrives hot on the heels of The Garden Against Time, a memoir-cum-environmentalist treatise published in 2024. It is a novel of stunning imaginative power that was apparently written in just three months. Set in 1975, during the making of two great works of Italian cinema, Federico Fellini’s Casanova and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, it is suffused with the glamour and intrigue of these filmmakers’ worlds. It offers a fictional retelling of the events that led up to Pasolini’s murder – a crime that remains unsolved – on 2 November.

A century ago, the Orkney poet George Mackay Brown was settling into his first term at Stromness Academy. His schooldays were to prove a dismal grind, but English lessons brought moments of magic. He was especially intrigued by poems – ballads, mostly – signed simply ‘Anon’. The name of the poet was lost – and perhaps there hadn’t been just one but a host of craftsmen in the making of each of these wonders. They were the creation of a tribe, the inheritance of a community, songs ‘seraphically free/ Of taint of personality’. Today, as publishers bust themselves to promote the cult of individual authors, it’s a thrilling, liberating notion.

In this age of lies and delusions, the trickster may seem to be a peculiarly modern creature, but he or she is almost as old as literature itself. Long before phishing or fake news, stories about cunning foxes, Loki, Anansi the Spider-Man and Odysseus brought delight; Puck, Tom Ripley and Sarah Waters’s fingersmith Sue Trinder are some of their descendants. Encountering such a figure is always a joy, and in Laura Shepherd-Robinson’s latest novel, The Art of a Lie, there are two. Hannah Cole is a shopkeeper in 18th-century London, struggling to keep her confectionary business open. Her husband Jonas has been murdered, and we soon learn that not only is the celebrated author and magistrate Henry Fielding investigating Mr Cole’s death but that Hannah is, in fact, his killer.

Fifty years ago, the blasted bodies of three unmarried siblings, members of the Luxton family, were discovered at a Devon dairy farm, set in a lush stretch between the ‘lavender haze’ of Exmoor and Dartmoor. The youngest member of the family, Alan, was 55. He lay in his pyjamas and work boots on the cobbles in the farmyard. Robbie, 65, with cuts to his face, and Frances, 68, clad in a nightgown rucked up to her waist, were found together in the garden. All the doors to the primitive thatched family farmhouse were locked from inside. The ‘tragic trio’, as they were described by the tabloid press, were the last of an ancient line who had farmed at West Chapple, Winkleigh. Each of the victims had their heads blown off.