Well, I was wrong. Having read Richard Osman’s dire new novel, I groaned when picking up my next for review, another celebrity author, another big team behind them, and another celebrity topic, in this case a reality television adventure. Louise Minchin’s Isolation Island (Headline, 2024, £20) might have much to make you wary, with the celebs stranded in the midst of an unexpected storm in a ruined monastery on a remote, uninhabited Scottish island. And yet the plot works. This is Minchin’s first detective novel, and is well-paced, and reads well. The sudden death of the principal contestant is delayed to over half of the way through, which enables a prior buildup of characters and atmosphere, and avoids the plethora of death in say an Osman. If you have the strength of character to choose, read Minchin instead.

Another debut novel, Joanna Dodd’s The Summer Dare (Hera, 2024, £9.99) takes a group of middle-aged women and throws in the bomb of the disappearance of their group-leader a quarter-century ago, with a text from an unknown number bringing up the disappearance. A well-plotted, tightly-written and exciting novel set partly in 1999 and partly in 2024, with a further throwback to a 1920s’ mystery. Works very well indeed. An author of promise.

S.B. Caves’ Honeycomb (Datura, 2024, £9.99) mixes reality television, a mad scientist and Lord of the Flies

‘You mean … that Mountjoy went into the bathroom, locked the door, flung off his dressing-gown, and turned into a woman? …. Have you heard of sexual perversion? … Mountjoy may have formed a very real attachment to Eleanor Bing.’ Speedy Death (1929; Vintage Books, 2014, £9.99) was the first of the 66 Mrs Lestrange Bradley novels by Gladys Mitchel (1901-83), a teacher who was one of the more gifted novelists of the Golden Age, for which readers might find of interest the new film The Critic, which involves murder in a well-created 1930s. Mitchell’s novels largely went out of print but from 2005 were reprinted by Minnow Press, Rue Morgue Press, and, most frequently (29 titles by 2014), Vintage Books, a paperback imprint of Penguin Random House which has also titles by Margery Allingham, Nicholas Blake, Edmund Crispin and others. The pricing and production are good, but they come without an introduction. Bradley, a psychologist knowledgeable about Freud, is wise and kind, unlike Elanor who only keeps ‘aspirin in the house at all for the sake of the maidservants, in case they should suffer from aching teeth, or some such affliction common to the lower classes.

Murder, blackmail, adultery, bullying, finance, enrolments, succession politics. Well, of course, this is an educational institution, but, as parents play a role, a school rather than a louche university institution steeped in [well you complete for alliteration], modelled for example on Caius, Cambridge, or Oriel, Oxford. Another excellent new book, Jo Jakeman’s One Bad Apple (Constable, 2024, £20.99), focuses on Aberfal High School, a boys’ public school where the Head is found murdered in his study at the end of a sports day. A well-plotted account of an apparently impossible crime that throws acerbic light on the contrivances of society and personality: ‘none of us fit in. We’re all misfits, darling. Just trying to do our best to hang in there and hope that no one works out that we’ve been faking it all along.’ And so for staff, parents (male and female), pupils and the groundsman. The multifaceted resolve is psychologically agreable and clever.

Divine Fury (Pan Macmillan, 2024, £18.99) is the fourth of D.V. Bishop’s Cesare Aldo stories set in the Florence of the 1530s. Ritual of Fire, the third, I have already reviewed, and my favourable assessment can be fully repeated for this well-aced and multi-layered story set in 1539 and beginning with a garrotted body, posed like a crucifix, found near Michelangelo’s statue of David. Another follows swiftly, and then a third body and a new attempt. The plot is interleaved with the efforts of a brilliant female Venetian source of intelligence to avoid replacement as well as the issues of clerical obsession, tensions within the police, and homosexual life. Very well-written and a page-turner. Bishop has been described as ‘a serious rival to C.J. Sansom and S.J. Parris,’ but in some respects is preferable, not least because Sansom’s books were overlong and lacked Bishop’s tautness.

Martin Edwards’ smoothly written and ably plotted ~Sepulchre Street (Head of Zeus, 2023, £9.99) begins with a plot device similar to Chariste’s Cards on the Table (1936), but then spirals into a high-octane plot ranging from an off-stage Edward, Prince of Wales to the violent lowlife of 1930s’ London. Set there, in Rye and on Romney Marsh, the main device is again from Christie, in this case The Murder on the Links (1923), but works well. Some lovely phrases – ‘You can smell the jealousy on him; it reeks like a sour cologne.’ Or ‘He thinks a Miro is for checking your reflection.’ Rachel Savernake’s intellect keeps up with the moves of a range of villains, again with a tribute to Christie: ‘Detectives purr over physical evidence. The significant bloodstain, the suggestive footprint. I find psychological clues more illuminating. Each individual behaves in a distinctive way.’ The rush of characters to Rye has a faintly comic air, but this is an impressive work that will please many. Hemlock Bay (already reviewed) follows as the fifth in the series.

S.B. Caves’ Honeycomb (Datura, 2024, £9.99) mixes reality television, a mad scientist and Lord of the Flies. The protagonist, Amanda Pearson, a failed singer, is given an opportunity for a week in an isolated mansion with five others in order to trial an experimental drug with no adverse side effects. Instead, we have personal and social breakdown and a turn to killing. Forget the blurb: the old mansion does not hold ‘horrifying secrets.’ Instead, it is the unleashing of murderous narcissism that leads to a ‘what happens next?’ story in which the question of how the individuals have ended up being selected is also of interest.

Heather Critchlow’s Unsound (Canelo, 2024, £9.99), the third in a series, will reward those who like the world of her true crime podcaster Cal Lovett. This episode continues the story of the pursuit of his sister’s sadistic murderer, but focuses on a new case, that of Arran, a first-year Scottish rural student at Edinburgh University who went missing in 2010. The story is played out in 2009-10, 2024, and in the podcasts. An unattractive account of Edinburgh student life is depicted, but, possibly, the theme of disturbed élite societies has been overused of late, while some may feel there is simply too much of Cal’s personal life, not least his love-life and his daughter starting at the university. Still, a successful plot and a story well-worth reading.

Set in Brighton, Lynne Truss’s Constable Twitten novels, beginning with A Shot in the Dark (2018), provide a skilful approach to humorous detective novels set in the 1950s. Denzil Meyrick, an established detective novelist with his DCI Daley stories, has tried to do the same with the Yorkshire-based Inspector Grasby series. The Christmas Stocking Murders (Bantam, 2024, £16.99) is the second. It is darker than Truss not least because it is set in a bleak, very cold and decayed Yorkshire fishing settlement in 1953, where food other than cod is lacking; and the gentle wit of the Twitten novels is absent in a murderous slapstick that begins with the washing ashore of the body of a fisherman strangled with a stocking, another being responsible for the death of a publican. Smuggling, the Mafia, somewhat hapless local intermediaries, and a close attention to body parts makes for a story that will work for some.

Published in America a decade ago, Head of Zeus has now produced Matthew Palmer’s debut thriller The American Mission (£20). Palmer, a Foreign Service professional, now Deputy Chief of Mission at the American Embassy in London, uses Africa and adventure to examine the ethos of diplomacy and America’s foreign presence. We start with the abject failure to protect civilians in Darfur in 2006 and move into the ‘Heart of Darkness,’ one in which consolidated Mining is a key amoral player and intervening in Congolese politics seeking to suppress a popular movement for reform. Its rival, Altera Natural Resources, turns out to be linked with the CIA. An impressive thriller, one with goodies and baddies but also with nuance, thoughtfulness and lots of interest. The plot works well and the writing is good.

Another thriller, Anthony Price’s The Labyrinth Makers (1970) has been reprinted by Penguin in its new Modern Classics: Crime and Espionage series (2024, £9.99). This is a classic David Audley tale, one with a romance/sex aspect that will strike modern readers as dated, but with a good plot touched off by Soviet interest in the discovery of a RAF Dakota reported missing at sea in 1945 instead in a drained lake and with a cargo of rubble. An improbable tale that is not one of Price’s better ones.

Ross Macdonald’s The Underground Man is another in the series. Originally published in 1971, it was the 16th of the 18 Lew Archer’s published from 1949 to 1976, and brings Macdonald’s hard-boiled protagonist into a psychological thriller about men searching for their fathers in a forbidding California where ‘western music’ is ‘like the last wail of a dying frontier,’ and housing development is a matter of fraud, blackmail and murder. Macdonald (real name Kenneth Millar) had been abandoned by his father when four and the lives depicted are like his description of a ‘stuffy ornate room as if earthquake cracks were widening in the walls.’ Characters are trying to understand their past, and killing in the present accordingly, the dead ‘past lying, past hurting and being hurt.’ His laconic style, economy of characterisation, and depiction of relationships remain highly impressive. Millar fully justified the argument of W.H. Auden under whom he studied for his PhD that detective novels could be literature. For Archer ‘a hot wind was blowing in my face’ as he is pulled into an adventure in an age in which, as one character points out, there are ‘No more happy endings,’ while the doctor notes ‘there’s still not much we can do about heredity.’

A modern Gothic novel that is wonderfully brief

Current American writing is well-represented in a worthwhile volume, Best Crime Stories of the Year (Head of Zeus, 2024, £20) which was published earlier in the year in America by Mysterious Press as The Mysterious Bookshop Presents the Best Mystery Stories of the Year 2024. Avoid the mercifully short introduction by Anthony Horowitz which offers immature political reflections and a simplifying and inadequate account of the genre. Instead, turn to the wonderful variety of the entries. These range from the traditional hard-boiled, notably Nils Gilbertson’s ‘Lovely and Useless Things,’ to the historical, as in Shelley Costa’s Gettysburg 1863 setting of ‘The Knife Sharpener,’ from the highly topical, as in Fleur Bradley’s combination of drug smuggling and family dynamics in ‘How to Teach Yourself to Swim’ and Jeffery Deaver’s topical take on Alt-Right terrorism in ‘the Lady in My Life.’ John Floyd adds black humour in ‘Last Day at the Jackrabbit’ and Ace Atkins’ ‘Stunts.’ A classic small-group puzzle is provided by Michael Bracken in ‘Beat the Clock,’ while Doug Crandell’s ‘Down the Fire Road’ is North Georgia social crisis. In ‘El Paso Heat,’ Peter Hayes makes fraudulent accounting gripping, while Shells Legoullon in ‘The Backwoods’ offers paternal guidance as a way to deal with murderous assailants. Utah is grim in Victor Methos’ ‘Kill Night’.

Leonardo Padura’s ‘A Family Matter’ takes us to a Havana of family, criminality and the occult, Dan Pope’s ‘Snow over Hartford’ offers a drug-collapsed family, Annie Reed’s ‘Dead Names’ again turns on drugs and broken families, with the changed identities that are such a feature of modern American works to the fore, Cameron Sanders’ ‘Billowing Down the Bayou’ again shows drugs and broken families, Anna Scotti’s ‘Its Not Even Past’ brings forward changed identities, Archer Sullivan’s ably-written ‘Good Harvest’ drugs, Andrew Welsh-Huggins’ ‘Wonder Falls’ a very clever account of a successful family murder, Stacy Woodson’s ‘One Night in 1865,’ Vietnam, military service and the mob, and, as a bonus, ‘The Suicide of Kiaros (1897)’ by L. Frank Baum, better known for The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), is a succinct account of successful murder. Ignore the very weak Horowitz introduction. This is an excellent volume.

Yukito Ayatsuji’s The Labyrinth House Murders (Pushkin Vertigo, 2024, £9.99) is the fourth in his Bizarre House Mysteries, ones in which the boundaries between crime and imagination cross even though it overuses the concept of the Minotaur. Drawing explicitly on John Dickson Carr’s locked room mysteries, ‘what matters to me [one of the characters says] is the degree in [sic] which some kind of excessive, over-the-top element in the work resonates with me.’ Another says ‘I value surprise over logic … I can forgive a little bit of unfairness towards the reader, as long as there’s a big surprise awaiting at the end that turns everything on its head,’ a third later remarking ‘It takes more than the logic of a whodunnit to dissect a real murder case.’ In accordance with the will of a dead writer, four writers compete to write a mystery in which they are to be the victims in their own story; but the stories take over. The plot is first-rate, although, unusually, I guessed the twist. This is a welcome example of an excellent development in the strong Japanese tradition of detective story writing.

Peter Swanson’s The Christmas Guest (Faber, 2023; pb, 2024, £8.99) is a very ably plotted account of the 1989 visit of Ashley Smith, an American studying in London, to Starvewood Hall, the family home of her classmate Emma Chapman. A modern Gothic novel that is wonderfully brief (124 pages), with an unexpected and brilliant plot change at page 74 that enables the reader to see the deftness of the earlier section. First-rate.