The best detective fiction of 2022

The four team up with Mike Waghorn, Bethany’s former colleague and mentor, and their channel’s makeup artist Pauline; there’s PC Donna De Freitas and her senior, DCI Chris Hudson, and, of course, Bogdan, the Polish immigrant, with his quiet efficiency and utter devotion to Elizabeth and her husband, Stephen. Together, they embark on an adventure that takes them from Staffordshire to London to Sussex, intercepting money launderers, bitcoin investors, and a former KGB hitman, the floating swimming pool in whose apartment is a thing of wonder for Joyce.

It’s a wild ride, guaranteed to produce the kind of fuzzy warmth and deep-throated chuckles that the series has ensured from its onset, but the third book is also special because it deals with other changes — former MI6 spy Elizabeth’s quiet despair and fierce love for Stephen, sinking faster into his dementia; the many eccentricities of the other three members of the club and, the big question confronting PC Donna: is it truly love that thing that she and Bogdan have come to share?

A popular British quiz show co-host, Osman’s geriatric universe plays on absurdity at many levels, and very successfully, at that, but what shines through in the series, and especially, in this novel, is that it is hard to beat age in experience. In a world geared to cater to the young and the restless, age affords it grace, empathy and a forewarning that time withers all, even the most dynamic and resourceful.

The Twist of a Knife

The Twist of a Knife
Anthony Horowitz
Century
384 pages
Rs 699 (Source: Amazon.in)

Each book in Anthony Horowitz’s Hawthorne series has been a thriller in every sense of the word, but his latest, The Twist of a Knife, comes with an added bite: the narrator, the audaciously self-referencing mystery writer Anthony Horowitz, could also possibly be a murderer. Does that seem like too much of a giveaway? Worry not. Horowitz (the real one, that is) has enough bait to keep you turning the pages to figure out the truth of the murder.

When Sunday Times’ theatre critic Harriet Throsby gets murdered, soon after an utterly stinker of a review of the play Mindgame (which incidentally, the real Horowitz had written), our mystery novelist and his collaborator, the former Met detective Daniel Hawthorne, have to negotiate a maze of clues to figure out the identity of the killer.

There are red herrings aplenty, including many references to the real Horowitz’s works, such as Midsomer Murders, the long-running British detective televisions series, and to golden-age classics in the genre — it is hard to miss the overtones of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1936) by Agatha Christie, or to Alfred Hitchcock’s film The 39 Steps (1935); all clues point to the involvement of the fictional Horowitz — Throsby, an unpleasant and thoroughly disliked critic, had just panned his play; the murder weapon, a dagger, is from the writer’s collection and bear his fingerprints.

But Hawthorne is not convinced. “…if he killed every critic who had something bad to say about his work, there’d be hundreds of corpses littered across the country,” he says. The cast of Mindgame — star Jordan Williams, rising Welsh actor Tirian Kirke, and Sky Palmer—had equal access to the critic on the opening night’s party backstage at the theatre, as did the producer Ahmet Yurdakul and director Ewan Lloyd. Who had the time, motive and opportunity to commit the crime and who detests Horowitz enough to frame him for it? In an edge-of-the-seat denouement, Horowitz takes a conventional setting of the closed-door murder mystery and peels back each layer of the mystery with great aplomb.

The Ink Black Heart

The Ink Black Heart
Robert Galbraith
Hachette
1024 pages
Rs 899 (Source: Amazon.in)

In The Ink Black Heart, Robert Galbraith aka JK Rowling, gets to the heart of the murkiness that lurks in the depths of the Web and the toxicity that it can engender, a fact that the writer has been privy to first hand. The sixth volume of the series came out on the heels of virulent social-media attacks on the writer of the popular Harry Potter series for her purportedly transphobic comments on gender identification and biological sex, a controversy that has dogged her since 2020, despite her explanation on what guides her views and her absolute support for trans rights.

But back to the story where Edie Ledwell, co-creator of a hugely popular online cartoon, calls on the detective agency of Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacott, seeking their help to identify a relentless online troll, Anomie, who has been harassing her. The agency, short- staffed as always, is not in a position to take up the case, but when Ledwell is murdered soon after, and her co-creator Josh Blay attacked, the agency gets drawn into the case. The pursuit of Anomie leads them to the Web — a place where insecurities and egos, personal agendas and organised propaganda get amplified in manifestations of moral outrage, toxic fandoms and virtue signalling. Strike and Ellacott have to piece together the mystery and fight their own feelings for each other — the latter a tad tiring, given their obvious chemistry and rather cinematic procrastination — as they try and stall more murders from being committed. As always, the book could have been done with tighter editing, but this is a Strike novel of heft that explores the very real threat of social media and how easily and effortlessly it can spill over into real life.

Notes on an Execution

Notes on an Execution
Danya Kukakfa
Phoenix
320 pages
Rs 1,150 (Source: Amazon.in)

The popularity of crime shows on OTT platforms, especially those involving serial killers, is only attested by the proliferation of such shows that put the killer in an ambiguous zone of half-sympathy and, often, uncharacteristic glamour. In her novel Notes on an Execution, which was published at the very beginning of 2022, Danya Kukakfa, who in her other life, works as a literary agent with Trellis Literary Management in the US, unpacks the idea of the serial killer through story that is riveting in its scope.

Serial killer Ansel Packer, who’s on the death row, has only 12 hours to live. He is reconciled to his fate, but he looks upon himself as a person, whose story deserves celebration. But it’s a story that is not his to tell. Kukakfa chooses, instead, to tell it through the women around Packer — his mother Lavender; Hazel, twin sister to Ansel’s wife; and Saffy, the homicide detective, tormented once by Packer and devoted to the cause of bringing men such as him to justice. Alternating between Packer’s day of execution, to the story of his life told through these three women, Kukakfa picks at the idea of the serial killer that dominates cultural narratives, especially in the West, to explore nuances of justice, trauma and empathy through a narrative taut with suspense and rich in atmospheric details.

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