His first since 2015’s lauded Welcome to Braggsville, T Geronimo Johnson’s new novel arrives billed as “The Wire meets Colson Whitehead”. Over nearly 700 dazzling, dizzying pages, The Occidental Book of the Dead (Abacus, £25) shows why it’s attracted such heady comparisons.
The novel is largely narrated by George Washington Jonson, a veteran black cop in Atlanta who’s on patrol when his white rookie trainee shoots Anthony, a white teen. For Jonson and the reader both, that pivotal scene is viscerally chaotic and confusing. The consequences spin farther out of control with every passing day, leaving Jonson in grave danger. As one character warns with note-perfect Southern inflection, “Down here folks love everything about the Lord except him wanting to keep all the vengeance for himself.”
Jonson’s a terribly funny narrator, often with the acidic humour of a Gil Scott-Heron (whose work makes a crucial appearance). This very particular tone amplifies his experiences, which are at once infuriating, farcical and overwhelming, pointedly like the broader history of policing in the self-proclaimed “city too busy to hate”. Bouncing between past, present and future, Jonson’s account of his experiences fosters a pervasive dread about where the mystery’s going long before we know how it gets there.
This book’s sweep is hard to convey. A furious, sly postmodern mystery about a deeply corrupt society, it reads like what you might get if Ishmael Reed and Walter Mosley had scripted Chinatown. Challenging and enthralling in equal measure, The Occidental Book of the Dead is a stunning novel.
Cold Sunset (Penguin, £20) is the third in William Boyd’s stylish cold war series featuring travel writer Gabriel Dax. Gabriel has been an amateur spy since a few small favours for the UK foreign office led him to Faith Green, who ferrets out traitors from all corners of government. Four years in, his initial bemusement has waned: the money’s still good, but the increasingly complicated things Faith asks of him have come home to roost.
Gabriel’s sent to California to meet FT Falkner, a celebrated writer who’s near death and wants to share information about his war years at Bletchley Park. When Gabriel reports that Falkner identified fellow Bletchley member Angus Fairford as a Russian agent, Faith responds with “an unusual measure of outraged, almost destabilized, panic”, which should have given Gabriel pause.
But as with his perpetual plans to stop smoking his ever-present Gitanes, there’s significant distance between having a good idea and enacting it. This assignment quickly reconnects Gabriel to new and returning characters, including a CIA agent/lover (his spying makes for a spicy array of bedfellows), a vengeful gunman, a triple agent returning from Moscow and a resourceful locksmith who also knows how to dispose of a corpse.
Amid all that, Gabriel strives for a tidy existence. By the conclusion, however, “his unnerving, unwelcomed existence as Faith Green’s spy” reaches a crossroads, his path forward uncertain, at least until the next Dax novel.
Jo Spain’s Never to Be Found (Bonnier, £16.99) won’t disappoint her readers. Protagonist Veronica Page runs a specialised business: when someone wants – or needs – to vanish from their own life, she can help. She doesn’t ask too many questions, especially when a client’s easy, like Ben, whose abusive stepfather is intent on bleeding Ben’s inheritance dry. As soon as Ben’s of age, Veronica helps him disappear, taking his inheritance with him.
Though she eventually reveals a traumatic origin story, Veronica’s present life has all the trappings: meaningful work, a hot younger man who understands her wariness about commitment, a posh apartment. Until, that is, detective Seb Ashworth shows up.
Seb announces that Veronica’s instincts let her down a year ago, when she helped a depressed man escape his collapsing life. That man, Seb announces, was a fugitive who had brutally killed his wife and sister. Seb’s hunted him ever since and now demands Veronica’s help. Horrified by the idea she may have let a murderer escape, Veronica reluctantly works with Seb (who is, of course, quite fit). The catch: given her profession’s secrecy, she really doesn’t know the man’s new name or location.
As the novel speeds ahead, Spain folds in rich layers of twists and betrayals, past and present. Veronica’s real strengths are sometimes muted by this abundant plotting, but she has all the makings of a prominent series lead.
Former CIA agent Lily Sedako, the main player in Sara Paretsky’s Bad Company (Bedford Square, £20), shares a lot with Paretsky’s legendary Chicago private eye VI Warshawski. But the place that resonates most for Lily is Hayalistan, a former Soviet republic where she served decades earlier. When a New Yorker article about lithium mining there lands on her doorstep, Lily’s shocked out of retirement by its claim that some locals believe she was central to exploiting Hayalistan through a CIA-sponsored coup. She suits up for one final freelance op to learn who fed her to the journalist.
Lily’s CIA career ended unceremoniously after years of wildly successful results that made “younger, often male, agents look bad by picking up assets and intel they’d overlooked”. Now, she’s again a thorn in the side of CIA leadership, mostly characterised by their venal political agility in a presidentially weaponised intelligence service. The wiliness with which she outmanoeuvres the current CIA makes it clear their tech is no match for her old-school ears on the ground.
Paretsky lobs in a few espionage tropes – she’s particularly good at younger agents enthralled by (and older ones disdainful of) a legendarily troublesome spook – but Bad Company is never only about the agency. It depicts a professional woman’s third act, in which leaving on one’s own terms is quite clearly the Holy Grail. Paretsky impressively wraps all of that (and more) in a spy thriller.
Set in the same Pacific Northwest landscape as his phenomenal Coffin Moon, Keith Rosson’s Crone (Black Crow, £19.99) is a mystery in the very oldest, deepest sense.
Nearly blind and just 15, Hannah Lamp vanishes late one night, pulled into a van while walking along an isolated highway, leaving her friend Avery on the roadside. Thirteen years later, Hannah’s father Eli is still haunted by losing her. He’d been a cop, a good one, but after his wife Melanie died he fell into addiction, losing his hope, his career, and finally Hannah. Now he’s clean but under the thumb of local drug runner Dave, to whom he’s mysteriously indebted.
The plot escalates after local seer Vicki stumbles across a human heart bound in blackthorn, an unnerving work of witchcraft far beyond her particular powers. Dave then discovers his son Anton dismembered, conspicuously missing some organs, and orders Eli to catch the killer. At the same time, Avery returns to town, drawn back by vivid dreams of Hannah, whose fate hovers over them all. Eli, Avery and Vicki quickly begin finding some dark answers. As the title suggests, everyone learns those answers have roots deeper, more powerful and more supernatural than they could have imagined.
Although Rosson takes real storytelling chances here, his blend of horror and mystery delivers a memorable pay-off. Both brutally violent and deeply moving, Crone is a novel safest for broad daylight but one you’ll keep reading into the loneliest hours.
Brian Cliff and Elizabeth Mannion edited Guilt Rules All: Mysteries, Detectives and Crime in Irish Fiction (Syracuse University Press, 2020)