Patricia highsmith

Scarlett Thomas likes islands: either literal sea-girt territories or closed enclaves where this wickedly inventive novelist practises her richly enjoyable experiments in plot and form. If her recent Oligarchy found its sour-sweet spot in a grisly girls’ boarding school, The Sleepwalkers creates another insular possession: the Greek island of ‘Kathos’, which almost resembles Samos. Here, within sight of the Turkish coast, the newlyweds Evelyn and Richard arrive as late-September storms brew to undergo their honeymoon from hell. Ever since novels such as Bright Young Things (also island-set) and PopCo, Thomas has known how to fuse an acidly satirical streak of observation with storytelling artifice that keeps her readers pleasurably unsettled and alert.

This compelling and unnerving collection of stories is Lawrence Osborne’s first, coming in the wake of recent critically acclaimed novels – including The Forgiven, adapted into a film – and earlier works of memoir, essays and travelogue. Born in England, currently residing in Bangkok, Osborne has earned comparisons with Graham Greene for his portraits of flawed white characters in foreign settings, and Patricia Highsmith, thanks to the menacing noir atmosphere. These nine stories, written over the past decade, do not disappoint. Osborne removes his protagonists – English or American, on the young side of middle age – from their native environments and transplants them into exotic, perilous locations.

It has been three years since Amanda Craig’s previous novel, The Lie of the Land, the story of a foundering marriage set among the gathering shadows of Brexit. The Golden Rule is worth the wait. It opens with a nod to Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train, the classic thriller in which two strangers, meeting by chance on a train, agree to murder each other’s wives. In this case, the genders are reversed, and the strangers are two women, Hannah and Jinni, who meet on the long journey from London to Cornwall. Hannah, the central character, has escaped from her working-class Cornish family via university to London. But life has turned sour. Her husband, an entitled aristocratic sprig named Jake, has left her and their young daughter Maisy for the glamorous Eve.

A guide to reading in lockdown. My involvement with crime and mystery fiction started when I was four. The first book I remember reading for myself was Hurrah for Little Noddy. As Enid Blyton aficionados will know, this is the second in the series about a self-absorbed wooden doll. It’s a thrilling tale about a massive car heist (those pesky goblins), involving a red herring, a car chase, wrongful arrest (oh poor Noddy), a stupid police officer and the intervention of a gifted amateur (Big Ears’s finest moment). Drop everything and re-read it. Much of Blyton’s prodigious output is crime fiction writ small. I have a theory that its imprint on tender minds is largely responsible for the flourishing condition of British crime fiction over the past 40-odd years.