New crime novels and thrillers to read this June, featuring Stephen King and the final novel from Denzil Meyrick
Reviewed this month: Never Flinch by Stephen King, King of Ashes by SA Cosby, Last Orders by Denzil Meyrick and The White Crow by Michael Robotham
Our thriller and crime critic Myles McWeeney on the best new novels to read this month.
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Irish Times
2 days ago
- Irish Times
Aftertaste by Daria Lavelle: A brash novel about early 2000s New York that finds treasure in the trash
Aftertaste Author : Daria Lavelle ISBN-13 : 978-1526683946 Publisher : Bloomsbury Guideline Price : £16.99 Ukrainian-American Daria Lavelle's debut novel is a tale of love, loss and horror set against the freakish backdrop of Manhattan's dining scene. Kostya is a chef who can taste the food dead people desire, which he re-creates for ghosts to share with the ones that mourn them. As with many underworld ventures, things go amiss. Already, Aftertaste has summoned quite a stir, with a movie in the works. There's Stephen King in this novel's ancestry, in style as well as scares. Like King, Lavelle is unabashed that her prose can be clumsy and cliched – 'orgasmic eating experience', 'the perfect, crispy crackle of golden fried chicken skin'. What matters is momentum. Lavelle's writing pounds with bada-boom dialogue and the kind of adrenaline found in an over-heated kitchen during service. In the way she uses brands and celebrities as descriptors, Lavelle evokes Bret Easton Ellis in American Psycho. About one Russian kingpin, she writes: 'While his accent was goofy, all Rocky and Bullwinkle … his face was early-era Brad Pitt, the rest of him in an Armani underwear ad, his confidence reeking with too much cologne.' Just as Ellis never escapes the 1980s, Lavelle's New York, although purportedly present-day, is mired in the early aughts. Macho chefs and hidden speakeasies abound; the East Village is still cool, and Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential very much alive. There's a banquet featuring ingredients that once upon a time might have induced gasps – the endangered songbird ortolan, the potentially lethal fugu fish. Kostya's love interest Maura is by-the-book retro, a manic-pixie dream girl with purple hair. READ MORE Is Afterlife sometimes sloppy and occasionally bad? Perhaps, but to read it is a rush. Besides, one should be suspicious of someone who disdains all junk, be it a McDonald's French fry or Real Housewives marathon. As an elegy to a city where garbage and greatness go hand in hand, it's only appropriate to find a little trash in Aftertaste's soul.
Irish Times
3 days ago
- Irish Times
Never Flinch by Stephen King: Prolific author in crime thriller mode
Never Flinch Author : Stephen King ISBN-13 : 978-1399744331 Publisher : Hodder & Stoughton Guideline Price : £25 You don't write more than 70 novels without knowing how to follow your muse, and the muse that Stephen King is following is called Holly Gibney. She has now featured in seven novels or novellas for King, and she takes centre stage here again. Since we met her first 11 years ago as a mousy, repressed character in Mr Mercedes , Holly has found her confidence and blossomed into a smart and resourceful private detective. This story kicks off when the Buckeye City police department receives a letter from someone threatening to kill 'thirteen innocents and one guilty' in an act of atonement for the death of an innocent man. Holly is initially drawn into the investigation when the murders start, but then finds herself on the road acting as security for a controversial women's rights activist who is bringing her pro-choice rally from city to city, and has attracted the attention of a stalker with murderous intent. [ How Stephen King unlocks our imagination with every scare Opens in new window ] This is King in crime thriller mode, although elements of supernatural horror do occasionally push their way into Holly stories, where they seem ill at ease. The evil that Holly is chasing in Never Flinch is strictly flesh and blood, yet oddly the story feels less plausible than many of King's flights of fancy. READ MORE The idea that a shrinking violet such as Holly would take on a job as a bodyguard is utterly nonsensical – the character is far too smart and self-aware to put herself in that position – and is one of several elements that feel like parts from a different jigsaw. King takes aim at anti-abortion protests, queries the legal system, and there is a character that may or may not be trans, but is definitely problematic. It's a shame, as there are sections in here that work perfectly – the stalker gradually closing in on his prey could easily have been its own separate story, there are some heart-breaking father-son dynamics, and the murders in the serial killer story are genuinely chilling for how utterly senseless they are. King is simply too good at this not to make it a page turner but ultimately the whole novel seems to add up to slightly less than the sum of its parts.
Irish Independent
01-06-2025
- Irish Independent
New crime novels and thrillers to read this June, featuring Stephen King and the final novel from Denzil Meyrick
Reviewed this month: Never Flinch by Stephen King, King of Ashes by SA Cosby, Last Orders by Denzil Meyrick and The White Crow by Michael Robotham Our thriller and crime critic Myles McWeeney on the best new novels to read this month.
