NEW BRITISH CRIME SEPTEMBER 2024: LEE CHILD, ANN CLEEVES AND PAULINE ROWSON

Three enjoyable books by British crime writers to start your September 2024 reading off with.

Pauline Rowson is a real stalwart of the British crime writing scene. With over thirty books to her credit she has been turning out reliable enjoyable mysteries, often with a maritime setting, for around twenty years.

Her latest book, The Chidham Creek Murders (Joffe, 3 September 2024), is the eighteenth book in her series about policeman Andy Horton and is another fine tale.

The story opens with Horton being called to investigate the discovery of a body. Juliette Croft, a professional celebrant, is dead in her living room, sprawled on an orange velvet sofa with empty bottles of champagne and medicine neatly arranged on the coffee table beside her. It looks like suicide, but Horton is suspicious. It is too neat and tidy. The champagne glasses are dry, and there’s no smell of alcohol on the body. When Horton tries to notify Juliette’s next of kin, he discovers the sole beneficiary of her will is one Rodney Pierce, a multimillionaire businessman. Pierce, however, says he has not heard of Juliette. Horton’s perplexed, but when other deaths occur he realises that he has a murder on his hands.

The Chidham Creek Murders is a solidly plotted and engaging mystery. The story unfolds at a leisurely pace, but there are enough interesting developments to keep you reading. The central mystery around the nature of Juliette’s demise is well handled and the story gets a good kick along when the other deaths occur. The characters are simply sketched, but adequate, and Horton is an enjoyable central character.

There are no big twists or high concept plot lines, but instead The Chidham Creek Murders is a well written and entertaining crime story that builds to an unexpected conclusion. The final confession is probably a bit too neat, but I do not think that many readers will care. Fans of classic British murder mysteries will greatly enjoy this one.

The Chidham Creek Murders is released on 3 September 2024.

Ann Cleeves is another well loved veteran of the British crime scene, both in book and on the television scene.

Her iconic series about DI Vera Stanhope has garnered millions of fans around the world, especially as the result of Brenda Blethyn’s portrayal of the detective in the TV series Vera. Now as the TV show enters its final series, we have a new Vera novel from Ann, The Dark Wives (Macmillan, 27 August 2024).

The book opens with the discovery of a man’s body by the almost obligatory local dog walker. The body is found on the common outside Rosebank, a care home for troubled teens. The victim is Josh, a staff member, who was due to work the previous night but never showed up. DI Vera Stanhope is called out to investigate the death. Her only clue is the disappearance of one of the home’s residents, fourteen-year-old Chloe Spence. Vera can’t bring herself to believe that a teenager is responsible for the murder, but even she can’t dismiss the possibility. When a second connected body is found near the Three Dark Wives standing stones in the wilds of the Northumbrian countryside, superstition and folklore begin to collide with fact.

The Dark Wives has all the trademarks we have come to expect from an Ann Cleeves novel. The story is well plotted and clever, but never overly complicated. The mystery is well worked out and logical, and the outcome is a good surprise. The well established central characters seem like old friends, with their quirks and flaws, and Ann smoothly introduces a new member into the group. The broader characters are also well done, especially the poor inhabitants of the Rosebank care home. The reflections on the state of care in England for troubled teens is smoothly woven into the novel and give the story some good substance. I also really liked the background information on the standing stones and the local traditions and beliefs.

In all, another enjoyable novel by Ann Cleeves that will readily satisfy her many fans.

The Dark Wives is released in Australia and the United States on 27 August 2024 and in the United Kingdom on 29 August 2024.

Offering a very different reading experience from the Rowson and Ann Cleeves books is the latest offering from Lee Child, Safe Enough, (Transworld, 20 August 2024).

Safe Enough is an engaging collection of short stories by the man best known as the creator of Jack Reacher, who does not appear in any of the main stories. The tales range from a drunken confession by a drug-dealing hit man to a stranger in a bar, to an intriguing account of a strange US mission in Northern Ireland, to a long, single paragraph monologue by a man who is about to kill someone. For me, however, the pick of them is a clever story about the recruitment of a hard-bitten team for a specialist job.

The stories range in theme and style, but all of them have that tough, almost cynical, edge we have come to expect from Child. The writing is crisp and sharp, and the stories are not laden down with long descriptions. Most of them are in Child’s preferred first person narrative, but there are some good exceptions. The outcomes and twists are easily guessed in some of the stories, but this does not detract from the pleasure. Overall, an entertaining selection of stories.

In the interesting Introduction, Child describes the delight and freedom of writing stories that did not have great expectations about them, and which did not feature his famous character. It provides an interesting insight into his approach to short story writing, and certainly these twenty stories show his willingness to try different styles and voices. The legendary Jack Reacher only appears in a bonus story at the end of the book. A collaboration between Child and Tess Gerritsen, which also features Gerritsen’s character Maggie Bird, Over Easy is probably one of the better stories in the collection, and will certainly appeal to those after a Reacher ‘hit’!

Safe Enough is released in Australia on 20 August 2024, in time for Father’s Day. It is released in the United Kingdom on 29 August 2024, and in the United States on 3 September. 2024.