The best recent crime and thrillers – review roundup

The Runner by Scarlett Thomas; The Madman by Henning Mankell; Everything She Didn’t Say by Jane Casey; The Spy and the Snake by MJ Robotham; Murder at the End of the World by Akane Araki

The Runner by Scarlett Thomas (Scribner, £16.99)
Part thriller, part romantic suspense, Thomas’s latest novel begins in Cyprus, where 34-year-old Jay is literally on the run from someone who wants to kill him. Jay (not his real name) is well used to evading hitmen: the attempts on his life began at university, when a Japanese man arrived at his flat with a samurai sword. People have been trying to murder him ever since, the contract on his life traded like a commodity, in bitcoin. Now his only apparent ally is the mysterious Ellie, although – given his track record – it’s quite possible that she’s trying to off him, too. Just before the reader’s sense of intrigue turns to irritated bafflement, the action rewinds to Jay’s childhood in Kent, and the reasons slowly become clear in this quirky, exciting tale that takes in exorcism, dictators, high finance, con artists and marathons along the way.

The Madman by Henning Mankell, translated by George Goulding and Sarah de Senarclens (Mountain Leopard, £25)
Written in the 1970s and published in English for the first time, The Madman is set in a Swedish town in the late 1940s. The country’s wartime neutrality-on-paper continues to divide: the town’s pro-Nazis want the past forgotten, but the communist sympathisers, bitter about having been interned, want a reckoning. When a letter to this effect appears in the local paper, those accused, including the director of the town’s sawmill, claim that newcomer Bertil Kras has been stirring resentment for political ends. When the sawmill burns down, Kras is blamed for that, too, and the disintegration of the life he has tried to make provokes an existential crisis. An older Mankell might have been more concise, but the slow build towards inevitable disaster makes for true emotional depth, and the theme of othering, isolating and penalising people for their opinions remain horribly topical.

Everything She Didn’t Say by Jane Casey (Hemlock, £16.99)
Bestseller Casey’s latest standalone is her first book set in her native Ireland. In a remote cottage on the Mayo coast, a woman wakes to find her female companion has disappeared. Both the house and her clothes are covered in blood, and she claims to have no idea what has happened – but the locals swear that they only ever saw one woman, not two. Detectives Ben Butler and Liam Farrell – an engaging pair who are worth a series of their own – are sent from Dublin to investigate. They discover that a lot of things don’t add up, that the key to the mystery may lie in the past, and that there may be more than one person missing. Casey not only makes great use of the west of Ireland setting, but provides us with a mazy plot, wrongfooting and surprising us at every turn.

The Spy and the Snake by MJ Robotham (Aria, £18.99)
This second outing for spy Maggie Flynn is set in 1968. Now five years a widow and missing surveillance as she languishes behind a desk at MI5, she is given an off-the-books mission: go to Budapest and bring back boozehound Fitzroy Carver, a former defector with a sentimental longing for the old country and important information to trade about a traitor in the service’s midst. Of course, there is rather more to this than meets the eye, and Carver, who has insisted the job of springing him be done by a woman, proves strangely uncooperative … We’re definitely at the cosy end of the spy fiction spectrum here, with Maggie, who is something of an innocent abroad and surprisingly garrulous about the true nature of her business, getting more than her fair share of lucky breaks. More could be made of the period setting – James Bond and the Beatles are doing an awful lot of heavy lifting – but the self-deprecating protagonist is an endearing character and her travels across Europe are a lot of fun.

Murder at the End of the World by Akane Araki, translated by Jesse Kirkwood (Pushkin, £14.99)
Japanese author Araki’s intriguing debut begins with the world in chaos as a cataclysmically destructive asteroid hurtles towards the Earth. In just over two months it will hit the island of Kyushu, and most of the population of Asia are concentrating on getting as far away as possible, while others have chosen to end their lives. Only 60 miles from the projected epicentre, 23-year-old Haru, in a grotesque semblance of normality, is having a driving lesson. Her instructor, Isagawa, is an ex-cop whose overzealous pursuit of justice has resulted in her dismissal from the force, and when the pair discover a murdered woman in the boot of the training car, not even the impending destruction of the planet is going to prevent her finding the killer. The two embark on a road trip to find answers, and the instructor-student relationship blossoms into a delightful odd-couple friendship as they negotiate the chaos in this entertaining and thought-provoking mystery.