Murders for March

The fourth of Bernard O’Keeffe’s D.I. Garibaldi novels, The Masked Band (2025, £10.99), takes us again to Barnes where five national celebrities wear masks of leading popular singers so as to perform incognito at a pub concert. Next morning, a body wearing the Mick Jagger mask otherwise used by the lead singer is found in the latter’s garden. Who is he? Why there? Murdered or fallen to death? The singers, all apparently modelled on characters of the present (Gary Lineker and Hugh Grant spring readily to mind), are each somewhat insalubrious. The writing is good and there is wit and some menace, while the off-field solution works. Possibly it could have been 50 pages shorter, not least in shedding some of the routine stuff about Garibaldi’s personal life, and can he please be seconded from Barnes which is becoming somewhat tedious. Authors should be continually inventive, or else there is the thick custard of formula food.

Although the plot owes more to Tintin or, in parts, Sapper, than to any bite on reality, Orlando Murrin’s second fictional outing, Murder Below Deck (Bantam, 2025, £16.99), is a bracing read with turn-the-page pace and a successful setting on a superyacht. Jewel theft, murders, over-the-top rooms, food, drink, clothes and perfume detail aplenty, this is a perfect holiday book. The solution ties everything together, which scarcely describes life, and there are cooking hints aplenty, not least on scrambling eggs, as well as many recipes from Murrin’s celebrity fame in the culinary limelight. Not urban grit, rural mystery or cosy comfort, Murrin has found a niche of great promise.

D.V. Bishop’s superb series set in the Florence of the 1530s is sequential but does not have to be read accordingly. By chance I read the second, The Darkest Sin (Macmillan, 2022, Pan, 2023, £8.99), out of sequence. The discovery of the much-stabbed body of a naked man in a Florence convent is matched by that of a missing policeman in a riverside village downriver of the city. Both drive the plot, but the first is most prominent in a well-written account, rich in period detail, personal dynamics, and the complexities of violent death in a convent community. A book that greatly deserves reading.

Overwritten if not absurd in its plotting, like so many Gothic novels or “ancient storybook[s] full of wicked witches and dark forests”, Paraic O’Donnell’s The Naming of the Birds (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2025, £20), the third of his novels, takes Inspector Cutter and Sergeant Bliss on the track of a killer of the élite of late Victorian London. The cruel institutional treatment of children in a 1872 prelude is seriously overlong but, otherwise, O’Donnell does not utter “a single word that didn’t fit into its place like a bead on a bracelet.” Much of the book is in shadows — “The lamp’s flame dipped and quickened. In its pool of restless shadows, her face was a still mask,” but they are pierced with blood, and the hand as knife. The past is recalled with human bones, but also is a potent present in a grand passage in the National History Museum. Police politics, deadly women, the Damask, a homosexual brothel presided over by the stentorian Mrs Finucane, wit, colour, costumes, all are linked in mystery, murder and morality. A hit.

Having much enjoyed his latest novel, I found Guy Morpuss’ first two less convincing. Their science fiction characters are inventive but do not work well for me. Yet, for those who like the walls of the story to be breached, for example by several characters inhabiting the same body or by “surgical tools made from hard light” or by murderous chess pieces, then his Five Minds (Viper, 2021) and Black Lake Manor (Viper, 2022) will be for you.

Debut novel of the month goes to Sophie Stava’s Count My Lies (Century, 2025, £16.99), an overly slow-to-start work that gathers pace with great flair (when the narrator changes) as a no-hoper New Yorker who is a congenital liar enters the world of the monied Brooklyn élite as a nanny, only to discover that all is not as it seems and that more than one can lie. Well-observed, psychological portrayals, accusations, clothes, hair, and the turn to violent deceit. Brilliant.

Hansjörg Schneider’s Hunkeler’s Secret (Bitter Lemon, 2025, £9.99), the translation of a 2015 original, is the fourth of the series to appear in English. Basle-set again, Hunkeler is retired, hospitalised, and, as such, witnesses the apparent murder of the next-bed patient, Stephanie Fakhauser, an irritating one-time student radical who had become a banker in the prestigious but questionable Basel Volksbank. As with some Scandi-noir, this is an approach that probes dark roots in World War Two conduct. It is sparely-written, short, and first-rate.

Looking back to some still-classics, Peter James’s Dead Simple (2005, Macmillan, £6.99) is a Brighton-set, Detective Superintendent Grace story about fraud, cruelty, murder, and a page-turner of a plot touched off by stag-night spite that turns into disaster as a result of the witnesses dying in a car crash. A brilliant plot in which very little is as it seems.

Tony Hillerman’s Navajo-set novels also richly deserve re-reading, with both human and natural landscapes ably depicted and used. The Ghostway (Harper, 1984, $17.99) begins with a matter-of-fact killing outside the Shiprock Economy Wash-O-Mat and takes the Navajo Tribal Policeman Jim Chee thence into tribal death customs and thence into a trustless Los Angeles.

Not a murder but the second of Jessica Bull’s “Miss Austen Investigates” series, A Fortune Most Fatal (Penguin, 2025, £16.99), is a pleasing take on the great writer, with her family providing the setting for an inheritance anxiety, misjudgements, and much else. Light and readable.

Simon Scarrow’s A Death in Berlin (Headline, 2025, £22) is the third of the Berlin Wartime series focused on Criminal Inspector Horst Schenke. Set in Berlin in 1940, this is Fatherland and Philip Kerr territory. Scarrow’s characters owe something to The Maltese Falcon (and to Scarface in the dramatic and bloody storming near the close) but his account of gangsterism in Berlin works well even if he does not quite match Kerr’s skill in writing. Plot carries you along and the reveal of the murderer offers a well-conceived surprise. A series to watch.

Set in 1973 with bookends in 2023, Terry Deary’s Actually I’m A Murderer (Constable, 2024, £18.99) is both amusing and wry amidst its ridiculous plot. The writing could be better [Deary, for example, should know the difference between lack of interest and disinterest], but the prose flows well, the overdrawn characterisation is vivid, the multiple narrators handled well, the parody just right. A good book for the closing stage of a wait in Accident and Emergency.

Some novels may well have qualities, but do not always engage. At over 500 pages, Scott Turow’s Presumed Guilty (Swift, 2025, £20.00) did not hold my interest. Possibly it could have been written with greater drive and spareness. Callum McSorley’s Squeaky Clean (2023) deserved the high praise it received, not least from myself, but, in Paperboy (Pushkin, 2025, £16.99), the repetition of Glasgow grime is not so welcome, and some of the dialogue, for example that by Cindy Ampleford, is wearing in its authenticity and opaqueness. At least both of those have decent plots. The self-congratulatory, indeed narcissistic content and tone of Oskar Jensen’s Helle’s Hound (Viper, 2025, £16.99) is not accompanied by one to praise. Definitely, indeed definitively, one to avoid.