The Trials of Marjorie Crowe by CS Robertson
(Hodder, $29.99)
Marjorie Crowe is the Kilgoyne metronome, the “weird old lady” who walks the same route through her small Scottish village every day, including in and out of the local pub, where she can be met by stares and jeers. Some kids taunt her, others are fascinated. When local teen Charlie McKee is found hanging in the woods, the village really begins to turn against Marjorie. Then social media. “Burn the witch.” Another youngster vanishes, and Marjorie can’t explain her actions or trust her own recollections. Is she a victim or a monster? In an excellent if unusual novel that Robertson worked on while living in Dunedin as part of a fellowship for Scottish writers, readers are drawn into an unsettling, character-centric tale that dips into the occult while being horrifyingly plausible. History doesn’t repeat but it rhymes, as Marjorie faces internet lynch mobs and worse. Robertson sprinkles vignettes about real-life Scottish women executed for witchcraft in centuries past, a poignant reminder of how distrust can be stoked into persecution and power abuse, and how women who stand apart have been vilified throughout the centuries.
The Grey Wolf by Louise Penny
(Hodder, $37.99)
When it comes to at-times sinister small-town mysteries full of quirky characters, Canadian author Louise Penny is a modern master. Since 2005′s Still Life she has been entertaining readers around the world with the investigations of Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, recently portrayed by Alfred Molina in the TV adaptation Three Pines. Now in The Grey Wolf, the 19th instalment in Penny’s moreish mysteries, the action begins in the hard-to-find Quebec village that gave the TV show its name, where Gamache is interrupted by repeated phone calls. There’s a break in, a mysterious package, a cafe meeting that leads to murder. Is a terrorist group targeting Canada’s water supply? Gamache, his long-time 2IC and son-in-law Jean-Guy Beauvoir, and Inspector Isabelle Lacoste must travel from Quebec to the White House and the Vatican to prevent disaster. Perhaps Penny was inspired by co-writing a political thriller, State of Terror, with Hillary Clinton. Regardless, while The Grey Wolf’s plotline may lean more towards broad thriller than intimate mystery, Penny still infuses her tale with character moments and underlines her storytelling prowess.
Ice Town by Will Dean
(Hodder, $37.99)
As Penny does with Gamache and co, Will Dean expands the world of his beloved ongoing protagonist – relentless deaf reporter Tuva Moodyson, set to be played by Rose Ayling-Ellis in a TV adaptation – beyond her regular haunts in his page-whirring new “Scandi noir”. Long-time readers are used to seeing ex-city slicker Tuva uncovering secrets and solving crimes in Gavrik, an isolated Swedish village surrounded by the ominous Utgard forest. (It is apparently inspired by Dean’s own surrounds. Known as “the forest author”, he and his family live in a cabin deep in the woods of rural Sweden.) In Ice Town, the setting shifts to somewhere even more remote. Tuva is drawn to Esseberg, a mountain village cut off each night when its access tunnel is closed, after a deaf teenager goes missing. Then more people vanish. A body is found. Is the deaf teen a victim or a killer? Esseberg may be even creepier than Gavrik, and Dean delivers an excellent “locked town” mystery, a sort of stand-alone in his series, as chilling as its climate.
