Murders for February

Mindfulness leads to murder. Difficult work colleagues. Well, we have all been there and HR departments are no solution — indeed, they are part of the problem. There are the established solutions, notably fatal accidents and/or getting others to rub them out, but sometimes we all have to raise our weary heads. Karsten Dusse’s first novel, Achtsam Morden (2019), published as Murder Mindfully (Faber, 2025, £9.99) is for you. The protagonist, Björn, a hardworking lawyer (Dusse’s profession), has work-life problems, a difficult wife and faces the issues of modern society, including the problems of preschool selection for your child: “your child should always be baptised both Protestant and Catholic, and to get into a secular preschool you should be ready to abandon that faith at the drop of a hat.” Sent to a mindfulness class, he finds its teachings very helpful even if the consequences might be “completely absurd”. They certainly enable him with equanimity to kill and get others to kill. There is satire on the modern world as in the environmental “change agents” who exploit South Asian child labour profitably to turn old tyres into shoes. Government and the police are corrupt or at least compliant, but the overall theme is humorous, and the darkness is kept at bay by the pace. A great success.

Yet my book of the month — again, pleasingly, a debut novel — is very different in its setting, although also witty. Sally Smith, the barrister author of A Case of Mice and Murder (Raven, 2024, £14.99) kicks off with the post-prandial murder in 1901 in the Inner Temple of the Lord Chief Justice. Blackmailed by the threat of eviction from his living quarters, the precise and reclusive Sir Gabriel War KC, is obliged by the Treasurer to investigate so as to limit the shame of police direction. Very funny, well-observed, humane and deft, this is a delight and apparently is to be the first in a series.

Wit of a different type is provided by Carol Carnac’s Murder as a Fine Art (1953; British Library Crime Classics, 2025, £9.99), a brilliantly wry account of the murder by means of a falling bust of the Deputy Permanent Secretary in the offices of the new Ministry of Fine Arts located in a Decimus Burton mansion. Art snobbery, civil service overmanning, procedures and ethos, the idiocies of modern art, and the naivety of post-war socialism are all ably dissected in a well-constructed story by Carol Rivett one of the great “Queens of Crime” usually writing as E.C.R. Lorac. She had studied at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London, and was an accomplished artist. Chief Detective Inspector Julian Rivers is the detective and Humphry David the minister who dislikes the pretension of where he has been shoved.

A very different context and approach is taken by Sergio Olguín in The Best Enemy (Bitter Lemon, 2025, £9.99), a translation of the fourth of his Verónica Rosenthal stories first published in 2021. Buenos Aires emerges as a mélange of a grim corruption that impregnates business and spreads to much else, and in response but also interwoven the efforts of individuals to follow their own path. This is an investigation that is described by one of the protagonists as: “About the same thing as usual: the links between the powers that be and the criminal world.” There’s a bit of everything in there: influence-peddling, international espionage, links with the Argentine state and complicit media. The writing can be wry — “It was an experience as heady, and timely, as joining a tsarist newspaper in 1916”, and, for WhatsApp messages with emojis: “Humanity had taken centuries to evolve beyond the pictographic stage of writing, only for new generations to ditch the clarity of the Latin alphabet in favour of a little squinty face and some renditions of fire that were open to interpretation.” Under pressure are honest journalists: “The kind who have more than one source, who don’t get swayed by platitudes or preconceived ideas; the kind who value facts over opinion and an honest opinion over vested interests (her own or the company’s).” The Verónica backstory is novelistic rather than always focused on the plot, and some of the politics may strike readers as highly partisan, but this is an impressive, well-written and consistently interesting work.

Jørn Lier Horst’s The Traitor (Michael Joseph, 2024, £18.99) takes us to a cold and very wet Norway where a non-fatal landslide in a residential area is followed by the discovery of a body of someone murdered earlier. This spins rapidly into the pursuit of Swedish-based kidnappers who hit back by kidnapping the granddaughter of the police protagonist, William Wisting, blackmailing him into providing information. Wisting, in turn, is convinced that something similar has happened with their Swedish police colleagues. Written without any style or flair for language — there is too much of “she nodded and left. Wisting paid a visit to the toilet while he mulled things over” — this is, nevertheless, a well-constructed page-turner.

Far-better written, and with a real flair for arresting phrases, Richard Coles’s

 (Weidenfield and Nicolson, 2024, £22) is more thoughtful and interesting as a “cosy crime” novel than Osman’s dire versions, and is the best from Coles so far, with more developed characters and a tighter plot in which there is less of a reliance on killing to move the story along. Following on directly from his previous detective outing for Canon Daniel Clement, this takes the protagonist to the Anglican Abbey of Sts Philips and James. Will suit particularly well those who like moral discussions and theological and ecclesiastical contexts, but this new version of a Father Brown character has much to offer all.

Following on from Blood Roses, located in the aftermath of German conquest in 1939, Douglas Jackson’s Blood Sacrifice (Canelo, 2024, £16.99) is set in Warsaw in the run-up to the German destruction of the Ghetto in 1943. “Jackson’s hero is the natural heir to Bernie Gunther,” proclaims a blurb comment, but that is so not-so, for this is far, far darker in content and mood. Jan Kalisz, Polish Kripo investigator and Resistance double-agent, operates in a more horrific context and the descriptions, notably of death in the sewers under the Ghetto, are grim. The writing is powerful and the book a true page-turner, although the solution to the murder of the corrupt SS-Sturmbannführer Axel Weiss is unconvincing as, even more, is the reason. The corruption as well as violence of the Reich and its agents emerge in well-etched detail. An impressive work.

Rebecca meets Elle the Influencer in Amanda Cassidy’s The Perfect Place (Canelo, 2024, £14.99). A chateau renovation in Provence proves the focus and fulcrum for a well-constructed and interesting story about the standard dark secrets and bad backgrounds, but one given a shake of real flair in the peeling back of a murderous encounter to discover the who and why done-its of a series of crimes and misdemeanours. There is room for irritation with two of the protagonists, but also interest in what is going to happen to them.

Very much written for those who know Los Angeles well, Jonathan Kellerman’s Open Season (Century, 2005, £22) takes his combination of detective Milo and psychologist Alex in pursuit of what becomes a series of killings linked by accurate fire from a particular rifle. An effective and interesting account of modern America that provides a good plot alongside some somewhat pedestrian descriptions of people and buildings.

The great success of David McCloskey’s well-grained Damascus Station was followed by a more jumbled Moscow X. In The Seventh Floor (Swift, 2025, £20), we have the search for a traitor within the CIA by Artemis Procter, who has been thrown out by a bureaucratic new Director. The plot spans East and West, with both apparently divided. The pace is good, and some of the writing is wry: “Laskin was the type of subordinate that made you fantasize about a return to Stalinism, if only to end the argument by putting a bullet in his neck.” And yet that quote provides part of the problem: you do not need the section beginning with “if only”. Indeed, there is a somewhat overwritten character to much of the prose that clashes with the pace. This is a book with fit characters that is not written in a spare style. The plot is appropriate for the story, but underplays the simultaneity of many narratives and elements in Intelligence, and I would not recommend an American ex-agent on a bright morning taking a semi-automatic shotgun and silencer through the streets of the Marais: the French agencies would not be amused. More seriously, this is writing as if for an action movie. Nothing wrong with that, and he has to feed his family. But if McCloskey, who clearly has great promise as well as good sales, wants to produce spy literature, maybe some nuance, some characters with more depth, and an avoidance of lazy prejudices and time-wrong tropes, would all be welcome.

For those liking films that take characters into new waters, Agatha and the Truth of Murder (2018) is well-acted and produced, although the solution, while interesting, is implausible. The sequel, Agatha and the Midnight Murders (2020) is much less satisfactory, although the solution is impressive.