Prophet Song
by Paul Lynch
(One World, $37)
In a near future, Ireland has been overtaken by a Far Right party that imposes authoritarian control, beginning by targeting trade unionists, in particular those representing intellectuals and academics. The terror begins with the disappearance of those demanding better wages for teachers. Cynically, horrifically, this culling is deemed the “Great Wakening”. Those deemed to be opposed to the new regime are “let go” from their jobs. Larry Stark, a union leader, is taken from his home. His wife, Eilish, is trapped in a place between despair and futile hope. She has four children to protect. Then her eldest son also goes missing. To find him, she must endure a terrible journey across a city where there are snipers and checkpoints and unsympathetic soldiers. A sense of community is also vanishing. Self-preservation is all. People are fleeing the country in rickety boats, paying exorbitant amounts to people smugglers with no guarantee of making it to a place of safety. Eilish has the most awful of choices. Should she attempt to escape with her remaining three children or should she stay for the sake of her elderly father, who is disappearing into dementia?
Strictly speaking, Prophet Song is not a thriller but it has all of the pace, and more than the terror, of most thrillers. Much of the dialogue is stream of consciousness. It works. When you are imprisoned or disappeared or you can trust no one, you have only yourself to talk to.
Devil’s Breath
by Jill Johnson
(Black & White, $36.99)
Professor Eustacia Rose is, or was, a professor of botany at a prestigious university. Her field of expertise is the study of poisonous plants. After an unfortunate incident in her laboratory, she has been given the boot.
She has lived alone since her beloved father died a year earlier. In an eccentric homage to his memory she wears his ancient frayed clothes and replicates his hair style: “Precisely parted with Brylcreem and a tortoiseshell comb.” She is 44 and looks like an old man. She knows she looks odd but she doesn’t care. And there is nobody to look at her. She has no friends or visitors and she seldom goes out. She likes plants better than people. On the roof of her flat she keeps her collection of rare and toxic plants. Nobody has ever seen her collection. For one thing, it is illegal – she is supposed to have a permit to keep them.
Also on the roof is her telescope. She surveys the skies but also her neighbours, which she excuses as “a form of social observation. A scientific pursuit, if you will.” She develops a “fascination” with a beautiful young woman who lives opposite her. She names her Psycho after one of her favourite poisonous plants, Psychotria elata.
She strikes up a strange friendship with Psycho, who she believes she witnesses being kidnapped. This leads her to go detecting, which results in a plot as beguiling and hallucinogenic as the effects of some of her plants.
Johnson, a Māori writer who lives in the UK, has written a book as fabulously eccentric as Professor Rose.
West Heart Kill
by Dann McDorman
(Bloomsbury, $37)
Set in a fancy and secretive country club, West Heart Kill is an ingenious trick of a murder mystery in which the reader gets to play along. At various times you are either the mysterious private detective – nobody knows who employed him and he’s not giving anything away – or you are attempting to figure out just what he’s up to. You are instructed to choose from a list of possible suspects from the residents of the lodge, whose main form of entertainment is getting drunk, having extramarital trysts and illegally shooting wildlife. And, occasionally, as it turns out, each other.
It is also an arch dissertation on the rules and tricks of the genre of mystery writing. “… the Chekhovian principle of a gun in the first act being fired by the final act need not always apply and in fact an artful author can exploit that expectation as its own kind of ruse.” This is an often wryly funny, clever series of ruses.
