3 Nerve-Shredding New Thrillers

New York Times

19-05-2025

Marble Hall Murders
Horowitz's diabolically clever MARBLE HALL MURDERS (Harper, 592 pp., $28) begins as Susan Ryeland, a British book editor, starts reading the newest installment in a crime series featuring a Poirot-like detective named Atticus Pünd.
The book looks promising — the plot is enticing, the writing sharp, the detective as canny as ever. But Susan soon realizes that what she's reading isn't 'just a cheerful murder mystery bringing back a much-loved character,' as she puts it, but rather a 'bubbling cauldron' of hatred, infidelity, greed and murder drawn from the troubled past of the writer, Eliot Crace.
Eliot, who has been hired to continue the series following the untimely death of the original author, is squirrelly, pugnacious and keen to make trouble. 'I've put in a secret message,' he says of his work-in-progress. 'If you can work out the puzzle, you'll know the truth about what happened.'
That's only the beginning of Horowitz's multilevel romp, which serves up an elegant plot while lampooning writers, publishers, murderers, rich people and golden-age mystery stories. It's a cliché to describe prolific authors as being at the top of their game (and often seems to suggest the opposite), but it's true here. 'Marble Hall Murders' is as cunning a mystery as you'll read all year.
The best thing is Susan herself. Stubborn and fearless, she has high literary standards, a fondness for Garamond typeface — and a dangerous habit of collecting enemies.
The Death of Us
'I found out that they had you the day after my 55th birthday,' says Isabel Nolan, the part-time narrator of THE DEATH OF US (Viking, 336 pp., $27), Dean's devastating exploration of the long-term effects of violence. The 'you' in question is a particularly nasty rapist and murderer named Nigel Wood, who attacked Isabel and her then-husband, Edward Hennessy, 25 years earlier in the house they shared in London. They survived, at least physically; many of Wood's other victims did not.
Wood, an outwardly unremarkable retired police officer who is now 70, has pleaded guilty and is facing sentencing; Isabel, Edward and others have been invited to provide statements at the court proceeding. Many of them have waited years for this moment. Their stories are devastating.
By focusing on the victims rather than on, say, the drama around the police investigation, this wrenching book subverts the normal conventions of a serial killer novel. It's an unusual and effective approach.
Threaded throughout is the story of Isabel and Edward's early years together, and the promise of their marriage, blighted forever by that awful night. What's it like for them to meet again like this, years after their divorce? What will happen when Edward finally speaks about something he's never before discussed publicly?
'Life is not a thread that can be unpicked,' Isabel muses, again imagining that she's speaking directly to the attacker. 'But all the same: If I had never met Edward, I might never have met you.'
Ruth Run
Meet Ruth, a plucky 25-year-old cyber-criminal who learns, via a series of middle-of-the-night phone alerts, that her ingenious scheme has been discovered. 'It was time to delete everything and go,' she says. 'My years of peaceful bank robbery were done.' Thus begins the funny and suspenseful RUTH RUN (Penguin Press, 304 pp., $29), which tells the story of Ruth's efforts to elude capture.
Just as you might in such a situation, Ruth scrubs the data from her devices, sets off the fire alarm and sprinkler at her company and drives off in her grubby Honda Civic, buoyed by the knowledge that she has $250 million stashed away in Switzerland, Belize and the Caymans. Her escape is complicated by the efforts of a government official named Mike, who has been semi-stalking her for some time, fantasizing about how she will one day work for him.
'I'd spent five years installing and upgrading surveillance in Ruth's apartment, never imagining having to disassemble it piece by expensive piece while she drove away from me at 67 miles per hour,' he whines.
Mike thinks he's a puppet master, but he's really a dummy. As she tries to outsmart him and other pursuers, Ruth runs into a slew of unusual characters, including a long-haul truck driver with a dark secret and a load of explosives, a group of religious zealots on a commune and an elderly dog. We're on her side the whole way.
Is it necessary for computer illiterates to understand the technical details of how Ruth deployed (among other things) a 'hacked microchip' to steal from 'legacy mainframes' operated by the nation's banks? Kaufman devotes many pages to complex machinations, but this is one of those times where you'll just have to trust the author.