CRIME  | Daily Mail Online

THE SEARCHER

by Tana French (Viking £14.99, 464 pp)

Already acknowledged as one of the finest writers of contemporary crime fiction, French has recently branched out from her successful Dublin Murder Squad series with two standalone novels.

Her first, The Wych Elm, was a bestseller, and this second is even better.

Burnt-out Chicago cop Cal Hooper, decides at 48 that he can’t cope with the mean streets or the aftermath of a divorce, so takes himself off to a remote Irish village.

Then Trey, a local teen, starts to haunt his cottage. The boy knows Cal was a cop and wants him to find his elder brother, who has been missing for months. Reluctantly, Cal investigates and a series of ugly truths starts to emerge.

A story of redemption and friendship, love and betrayal, it is a work of great strength and beauty.

A SONG FOR THE DARK TIMES

by Ian Rankin (Orion £20, 336 pp)

Like a fine single-malt whisky, Rankin grows better with time, just as his ageless detective John Rebus grows ever more compelling.

Now retired, and with medical problems that mean he finds stairs hard to cope with, Rebus is moving into a ground-floor flat.

But then he gets a call from his daughter, Samantha, saying her partner, Keith, has been missing for two days.

Famously not the most attentive father, Rebus nevertheless sets off for the rugged north coast of Scotland to discover what has happened.

But when Keith is discovered murdered in what was once a wartime internment camp, Samantha becomes a prime suspect. To prove she is innocent, Rebus will have to unravel the tangled web of lies told by the locals and overcome a landowner’s objections to anyone poking their nose into other people’s business.

THE WINDSOR KNOT

by S. J. Bennett (Zaffre £12.99, 320 pp)

This debut adult novel from former YA author Bennett is based on a delightful conceit — that the Queen is secretly a private detective.

On the morning after her 90th birthday celebrations, in 2016, a guest who has been staying at Windsor overnight is found dead in his bedroom in distinctly suspicious circumstances — that may well involve auto-eroticism.

When MI5 begin to investigate, suspicion falls on members of the palace staff.

However, the Queen is convinced the spymasters are looking in the wrong place, and, with the help of her female assistant private secretary, she sets out to uncover the real killer.

Packed with cameos from the likes of Sir David Attenborough to the Archbishop of Canterbury, it feels like an episode of The Crown — but with a spicy dish of murder on the side.

No surprise, then, that it has already been lined up as a five-book series.

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