Marie Kondo, but for murder: Five addictive new crime novels to read

Crime is a capacious and inventive genre. From police procedurals and amateur sleuths to the current wave of psychological thrillers featuring women on the edge, there’s something for everyone here, from the comfortably predictable to the mind-blowing.

Ironwood by Michael Connelly

It’s hard to keep up with Michael Connelly. The prolific American crime writer is now publishing two books a year, which is how I came to miss the first, Nightshade, in this energetic new series. Detective Sergeant Stilwell (“people call me Stil”) of the LAPD sheriff’s office is a likeable addition to Connelly’s burgeoning ensemble cast.

Stilwell’s beat is the island of Santa Catalina, 20 miles off the coast of California. It has hardly any cars, a herd of feral bison and an art deco casino built by the chewing gum magnate William Wrigley in the 1920s. It also has a very low crime rate, although probably not any more, now Connelly has moved in.

Ironwood (Allen and Unwin, $35) starts fast. Stilwell is on a stakeout, having received a tip about a drug drop. As the plane lands and prepares to take off again, his team make their move. It’s a bad one. A deputy is killed, another seriously injured and Stil is confined to his desk, pending an investigation.

Bored, he decides to Marie Kondo the lost-and-found section, only to discover a backpack with links to the cold case of a missing hiker on the mainland. Many intrigues abound.

Murder at Thornwood Park by Joan Sauers

With Murder at Thornwood Park (Allen and Unwin, $35), the third in a series featuring historian Rose McHugh, Joan Sauers establishes herself as the crime queen of the Southern Highlands.

For anyone who appreciates a map, there’s a helpful rendering of the locale from the Belanglo State Forest to Robertson , as well as some invented places of interest you aren’t going to discover on a day trip from Sydney.

One of these is Thornwood Park, a decaying mansion fit for Miss Havisham, lurking at the dark heart of a story about the downfall of a wealthy farming family during the World War II. As director of the (fictional) Highlands Area Museum, Rose is invited to the derelict house to see if there is anything of value among the old photos and shopping lists, the very “stuff of history”, she notes.

And there is. As well as evidence of dirty deeds that will take Rose back to a time when members of the Women’s Auxiliary Australian Air Force were in local residence. Trained as domestic pilots, telegraphists, map readers, radio operators, electricians, mechanics and radar analysts, they were part of the large number of women who helped win the war.

As always, Sauers is keen to set the historical record straight in a mystery that makes effective use of its regional setting.

Night Swimming by Sharon Kernot

It’s been 32 years since The Monkey’s Mask, Dorothy Porter’s stunning crime novel in verse. Although perhaps not quite as dazzling, Night Swimming (Text, $35), Sharon Kernot’s first verse novel for adults, does Dorothy proud. It also picks up on her themes of dangerous women and sexual obsession, a refreshing departure from the victim-survivors of domestic noir.

January Clare Olsen can’t sleep. Her memory is “tainted with dreams” of her best friend Julie and their nocturnal aquatic adventures:

We were childhood besties –
inseparable, thick as thieves, joined at the seams

But Julie drowned and now January is stalking a man she remembers from that time, determined to seduce him and get some answers.

As she fails to navigate her addiction to sedative-hypnotic sleeping pills, her adoring and boring boyfriend Tom, and Nikki at work – who is out to get her – it becomes clear that January is on a slippery slope. Enjoy the trip, but prepare for a bumpy landing.

The Missing Mother by Mali Cornish

Another woman at risk is Elspeth Frank, whom we first meet on a doomed date in New York, where she is a successful journalist with a bestselling book about a dodgy hedge fund manager. She’s got a great idea for a second about X, Elon and the Death of Soft Tech, but something’s off about Elspeth. For a start, she has a phobia about knives, is superstitious about the number five and seems a bit too preoccupied with blood.

And then her sister calls. Their mother, Simone, has gone missing from the grand old house in Geelong, from which their artist father also disappeared many years earlier. Coincidence much? Dosed up on Valium, Elspeth heads home to face a host of personal demons that will surface, somewhat predictably, from the ashes of the pyre on which their mother destroyed their father’s paintings. The Missing Mother (Atlantic Books, $35) is a slow burn of a book with another unsettling conclusion.

Honey by Imani Thompson

Honey (The Borough Press, $35) by Imani Thompson may be the most disturbing and clever crime book you will read this year, if it is indeed crime. Yes, it begins with a murder, sort of, and there will be more. But Thompson also leans into chick lit, comedy, as well as the literary and philosophical tropes of dark academia (think Donna Tartt’s The Secret History). The net result is an unputdownable walk on the wild side that will leave you wondering what just hit you.

The answer is Yrsa. Why a young black woman of Caribbean descent has a name which in Old Norse means “she-bear” or possibly “wild and furious” is never explained, although entirely appropriate. Yrsa is a postgrad at Cambridge University with an unfinished thesis on Afropessimism and black women’s liberation. The intermittent grabs from this dissertation are deliciously apt as Yrsa supposes: “If violence turns subject into object, then is it only through violence that one can return to a subject position?”

She also has some tenuous friends among her fellow postgrads, one of whom has been having an affair with her supervisor, who has lied about love and stolen her research. During a chance encounter with said supervisor in the park, Yrsa casually flicks a bee into his lemonade.

As he spirals into anaphylactic shock, she calmly finishes her ice-cream and waits for the stillness. Yrsa has just put her theory of violence into practice and we’re only on page 25. Forget closure, we’re in new genre territory here.

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