Suspicious Developments

The Larkspur Incident

by Frances Okafor · Hodder & Stoughton, £20

DCI Mara Adeyemi is first on the scene when a property developer is found beneath the foundations of his own flagship regeneration project in South London. The site has been a battleground for years: heritage campaigners, local residents, Islington councillors all with reasons to wish the man ill. That a victim could accumulate so many enemies and still keep his planning permissions intact says something either for the tenacity of the planning system or the depth of his pockets.

Frances Okafor writes South London with the kind of affectionate precision you can only achieve by having lived there, and Adeyemi is one of the better-drawn procedural detectives in recent British fiction — principled, impatient, funny in a way that catches you off guard. The Larkspur Incident moves at proper pace and has a finale that, for once, feels genuinely inevitable rather than merely convenient.

Where the novel earns its stripes is in the texture of the investigation: the inter-agency friction, the cold trail of digital evidence, the press camped outside the cordon eating terrible sandwiches. Solid, satisfying, and rather better than the cover suggests.

The Cold Between

by Kristoffer Lundqvist, translated by Helena Rydberg · Orion, £22

Gothenburg, January. Detective Ingrid Lövgren is called to a frozen lake where the ice has been sawn open with surgical precision and the body of a retired Europol analyst placed within. The victim, it turns out, spent the last decade of his career suppressing a report on organised crime penetration of the Swedish judicial system. Whether that is why he is dead, or whether it is merely the most interesting thing about him, takes Lövgren some considerable time to determine.

Lundqvist has been compared, rather lazily, to every Scandinavian crime writer you have heard of. He is his own thing: colder, more institutional, with a particular interest in the architecture of bureaucratic failure. The Cold Between is his fifth novel and his best — the prose in Rydberg's translation has an austere beauty that suits the material perfectly.

The resolution is perhaps slightly too tidy given what precedes it, but the journey to it is consistently gripping. Lövgren herself remains one of the most credible figures in contemporary Scandi noir: flawed in a way that feels earned, not engineered for sympathy.

Formidably accomplished. This is what the genre looks like when it is operating at altitude.

Know by Heart

by Rachel Carmody · Penguin, £18.99

Domestic thrillers have become so abundant that one barely notices when a genuinely unsettling one slips through. Know by Heart is genuinely unsettling. Claire Maddock has lived in the same Hampshire village for twelve years; she knows every household, every marriage, every poorly kept secret. When her neighbour Judith disappears two days after telling Claire something in confidence, Claire must decide how much of what she knows she is prepared to share with the police.

Carmody handles the slow erosion of social trust with impressive skill. The novel's central device — a community whose sense of mutual knowledge turns out to be its most dangerous feature — is elegantly constructed. There are two or three points where a sharper editorial hand might have tightened things, but the final third accelerates with real momentum.

What distinguishes Know by Heart from the pack is that it takes its characters' interior lives seriously. Claire's paralysis feels psychologically coherent, not merely a narrative convenience. An impressive second novel.

The Constable of Cheapside

by Thomas Bray · Bloomsbury, £20

Historical crime is a genre that rewards research and punishes laziness, which is why so much of it feels like a dissertation with a murder tacked on as pretext. The Constable of Cheapside is not that book. Set in London in 1666 — yes, that year — it follows John Lewyn, a ward constable trying to solve a poisoning that appears connected to a network of dissenters while half the city is on fire around him. The Great Fire is not backdrop, it is plot.

Bray has clearly immersed himself in the period, but wears his research lightly enough that the novel never sags under the weight of it. Lewyn is an engaging creation: pragmatic, morally serious without being priggish, and acutely aware of his own limited authority in a city where authority is being renegotiated almost hourly.

The mystery itself is genuinely tricky. The solution involves a strand of contemporary theology that most modern readers will find unfamiliar, which Bray handles gracefully. Handsomely done.

Paradise, Nevada

by Damon Cruz · Faber, £16.99

Las Vegas has been used as a crime backdrop so frequently that there is nothing left to say about neon and desperation. Cruz knows this and starts somewhere else: a strip mall insurance office staffed by a man who forged his own death seven years ago and has been living quietly under a stranger's Social Security number ever since. When his former employer's accountant turns up dead in the car park, the man who no longer exists must decide whether to remain invisible or come forward.

Paradise, Nevada has the compressed, propulsive quality of the best American noir. Cruz writes dialogue that is terse in the way that actual people under pressure speak — not the performative terseness of the genre's worst practitioners, where every exchange feels like an imitation of an imitation of Chandler. The moral stakes are calibrated with care.

The ending arrives fast and lands hard. This is an extraordinary debut, and Cruz will be one to watch for a long time.