First thoughts
TKEIGO HIGASHINO is an award-winning Japanese author and his 2006 novel, The Devotion Of Suspect X, which gripped two million readers in Japan alone and has been made into a film, has finally hit our shores.
The drama starts with single mother and divorcee Yakuso Hanaoka, who kills her violent ex-husband Togashi (with help from her young daughter Misato) after suffering years of abuse.
Panicking about what she has done, she contemplates turning herself in to the police, only to find her next-door neighbour, Ishigami, a mathematics genius, is on hand to help her cover up the murder.
Ishigami is in love with Yakuso and will do anything to keep the police from suspecting her — even if it means committing murder himself.
This book is confusing, gripping and clever. Full of twists and turns, and dripping in subterfuge, it’s nothing less than a brilliant thriller.
Gervase Phinn
Hodder & Stoughton; £18.99
HE has garnered a huge number of fans with his popular fact-based books about the joys of life as a school inspector, now Gervase Phinn has penned his first novel and, unsurprisingly, it is set in a school.
The former teacher, school inspector and nowadays best-selling author has used his years of experience to come up with the plot for The Little Village School, set in the imaginary Yorkshire village of Barton-in-the-Dale.
It is a story filled with all of the whimsy humour and colourful characters you would expect from a work by Phinn — rather like a cross between the Teacher novels of Jack Sheffield and Winifred Holtby’s South Riding — and the reader is left wondering when the next novel in the Barton-in-the Dale series will be published.
A cheerful, heart-warming summer read.
AL Kennedy
Jonathan Cape, £16.99; Kindle £10.70
SET on a cruise liner heading for New York across the rough, jerking Atlantic, The Blue Book evokes an unsettling feel, as do the slippery characters who inhabit it.
Arthur and Elizabeth, fake psychics who worked together and loved together once, are travelling on the ship separately.
Elizabeth is heading to the States with Derek, who is on the brink of a proposal, as she tries to escape the world she has left behind in England.
An expert navigator of her characters’ interior worlds, AL Kennedy reveals enough to make readers feel both intrigued and a little seasick, with references to numbers and hidden meanings only adding to the effect.
What results is a stunningly original, compelling and tantalising love story of sorts, by a writer at the very top of her game.
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