Emotional baggage burdens Brit coppers

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 11/04/2020 (2323 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A madman is loose in Tyneside, murdering women whose only connection is being successful and confident, leaving no clues behind — or does he?

Coppers David Stone and Frankie Oliver both have the requisite tragic secrets in their super-heavy burdens of baggage, as they hunt the killer from Hexham to North Shields in Mari Hannah’s The Insider (Orion, 406 pages, $18).

Hannah is a superb writer — oh aye, she’s champion, she is — and this is one of the best police procedurals you’ll find this year.

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A woman so distraught about being romantically conned out of her life savings throws herself in front of a London tube train — sending troubled coppers Tom Thorne and Nicola Tanner spinning down the rabbit hole.

The villains are ultra-creepy, though that takes a while to get apparent in Mark Billingham’s Their Little Secret (Little, Brown, 386 pages, $35).

How do you build a murder mystery around a single mom chatting up other parents dropping off their kids at school before going for coffee? Really scarifyingly, that’s how.

It’s an absolutely gripping tale, but super heavy.

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Young artist Gerry Coneybear lives in an ancient huge house in rural Quebec that she inherited (along with 19 cats), having everyday ordinary rural Canadian interactions with ordinary super-nice neighbours and relatives.

There’s a young ski instructor down the road who’s kind of caught her eye, maybe a predator animal lurking in the woods, hints of a ghost next door and, by the way, murders and cocaine popping up occasionally.

Louise Carson’s The Cat Between (Signature Editions, 214 pages, $17) is a pleasant chat by a cosy fire with hot chocolate and fresh scones after snowshoeing in the woods and finding a dead body… for people who don’t demand much action.

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Someone quite evil within the gaming world is kidnapping people in Silicon Valley and subjecting them to acting out an insidious video game for real that’s nearly always fatal online. That bytes, man.

Luckily for those caught up in Jeffrey Deaver’s The Never Game (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 416 pages, $37), rewardist Colter Shaw (don’t call him a bounty hunter) is in town. He was raised deep in the woods as a survivalist by his paranoid academic parents; now he’s making a living finding people for money.

With Deaver, you know the plot will shift directions umpteen times and that in these kinds of books, paranoid conspiracy theorists are usually the smartest ones. Enjoy.

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A stereotypical hitman murders a British cabinet minister and a past-his-prime Scottish newspaper reporter amid pre-election European Union talks in Brussels — the only witness an autistic girl, and hot on the killer’s trail another whisky-swilling, chain-smoking embittered newspaperman.

An unknown Peter May wrote this 40 years ago, published only in the U.K.; he’s rewritten and revised, and The Man with No Face (Quercus, 406 pages, $33) is now here in North America.

Alas, it depends way too much on nasty men having epiphanies, of powerful people telling all to ink-stained wretches (like that ever happens), and May unforgivably fails to update 40 years of awareness about autism.

Retired Free Press reporter Nick Martin instantly became a huge Mari Hannah fan when she mentioned his hometown of Jarrow-on-Tyne.