The Summer Guests
by Tess Gerritsen (Penguin, $38)
Almost 40 years after she wrote her first novel, while a doctor on maternity leave, Tess Gerritsen continues to offer page-turning entertainment. Over the decades, Gerritsen has traversed romantic suspense, medical thrillers, her Rizzoli & Isles mysteries (adapted into a multi-series TV drama), and now tales set among the majestic scenery of Maine. The Summer Guests, a sequel to The Spy Coast, may initially have a whiff of Richard Osman with its cast of retiree sleuths, but Maggie Bird’s “Martini Club” are an atypical book group: seniors who have largely put away their “particular set of skills”.
They can’t, however, help giving local law enforcement unwanted help, especially when a friend becomes a prime suspect in the disappearance of a teenage daughter of the powerful Conover family, who holiday by the lake. Narrated largely from the perspectives of Maggie, acting police chief Jo and frantic mother Sue, The Summer Guests is an enthralling read in which past secrets and long-held tensions between locals and rich outsiders ignite in a summer holiday town.
The Bureau
by Eoin McNamee (Riverrun, $37.99)
For the longest time, most publishers treated the Troubles as an untouchable subject, even long after McNamee’s pioneering 1994 debut Resurrection Man, a novel based on the real-life Shankill Butchers, an infamous loyalist gang who terrorised Belfast from the mid-1970s. Or his Blue trilogy between 2001 and 2014, one of which was Booker-longlisted. In his latest, McNamee blends elegant staccato prose, striking characters – including real-life figures – and a vivid sense of time and place to soak readers in the lawlessness of the Irish borderlands during the waning years of the Troubles.
There’s Brendan, the disbarred lawyer running a money-laundering Bureau de Change. Paddy the gangster. Fuel smugglers, cops and judges on the take, paramilitaries and sudden death. And Lorraine, the vivacious mistress, who may be the most dangerous of them all. Whether you view McNamee as a literary author exploring violence or a crime writer of top-shelf style and prose, The Bureau is a bleak, brilliant masterpiece.
The Bookshop Detectives 2: Tea And Cake And Death
by Gareth & Louise Ward (Penguin, $38)
Modern crime writing is a big tent, and this grin-inducing sequel to the best-selling Kiwi novel of last year, Dead Girl Gone, certainly proves that. Wardini Books co-owners Gareth and Louise Ward’s new co-written cosy mystery is worlds apart from McNamee’s latest not just in geography but in tone and style. Tea and Cake and Death are all flowing in this light-hearted tale as our rather-familiar feeling protagonists, UK coppers turned Hawke’s Bay booksellers Eloise and Garth, find themselves investigating a new series of poisonings, rather than a decades-old case like their first outing. Who is targeting the book-loving community of the Bay? Has imprisoned British literary agent and serial killer Arthur Pinter, the reason for Eloise’s PTSD, reached out across the world? With its bookshop setting, appearances of some real-life Kiwi authors and name-drops of others, alongside some fictional scribes (Faith Saxon’s gruesome thrillers are “giving Paul Cleave a run for his money”), the second Bookshop Detectives tale is an ode to a love of books and community.
