5 Crime Must-Reads for February

The French Girl by Lexie Elliott

(Berkley)

The premise of The French Girl is simple enough: while six college friends were on vacation in the French summer house of one of their families, the woman next door, Severine, mysteriously disappeared. Now, ten years later, her body is found at the bottom of a well behind the farmhouse, and the vacationers become obvious suspects. Told from the point of view of Kate Channing, one of the six who is now building a business as a headhunter for law firms in London, Girl builds up suspense as it articulates the altered relationships between the former classmates, all of whom are being questioned by a sharp French detective who is determined to figure out what happened to Severine.

Sunburn by Laura Lippman

(William Morrow)

Lippman has described Sunburn as Anne Tyler meets James M. Cain, and though I’d argue that the Cain influence is stronger it’s an apt description of this taut and delicious noir. Redhead Polly, a housewife from Baltimore, picks up and leaves her husband and small child while on a beach vacation. She gets a job as a waitress in a small town in Delaware and falls into an affair with the cook, Adam, also new to the area (and as it turns out, a P.I. who is looking for Polly). Yet Adam is not the only one with secrets. Polly has a few of her own, and they are part of a troubled history with men she keeps tightly under wraps. Sunburn is a dark delight, from its homage to Cain’s classic The Postman Always Rings Twice to its shrewd observations about marriage and family.

The Imam of Tawi-Tawi by Ian Hamilton

(House of Anansi Press)

I’m hardly exaggerating when I say I don’t just read Hamilton’s Ava Lee books, I devour them. Though The Imam of Tawi-Tawi is the tenth book in the series, you can pretty much start anywhere and be seduced by Hamilton’s Chinese-Canadian heroine. Ava Lee is a forensic accountant by training as well as an expert in martial arts, which comes in handy while collecting debts from people who are less than eager to settle their accounts. In the last couple of books Hamilton has shifted Ava’s work from debt collecting to running an investment group with a close friend and her sister-in-law based in Hong Kong. But in Imam Ava is dispatched to a remote island in the  Philippines by a former client, who is convinced a school on the island is a training camp for terrorists. Like all of Ava’s adventures, Imam combines lots of action with Ava’s acute intelligence and ability to solve even the most complex problems.

Force of Nature by Jane Harper

(Flatiron Books)

In her follow up to last year’s excellent The Dry, Harper continues her series about government agent Aaron Falk, a mild mannered but stubborn investigator who keeps falling into mysterious circumstances. In The Dry, he helped solve the murder of a childhood friend while reckoning with his own past, especially his strained relationship with his dead father. In Force of Nature, Falk and his partner are called into the Australian wilderness when a witness in one of his cases, Alice Russell, disappears while on a corporate retreat. Falk was encouraging Russell to be a whistleblower at the financial firm where she works, so when he receives a mysterious voice mail from her in the middle of the night while she’s on the retreat he suspects someone has found out about her involvement with trying to take the family run company down. But Falk cannot figure out why Russell went missing until he finds her, and a full-on manhunt ensues. Nature reinforces Harper’s gift for creating characters with complicated relationships and especially for writing about wild landscapes, where anything can happen.

I’ll Be Gone in the Dark by Michelle McNamara

(Harper)

I’ll Be Gone in the Dark has a tragic backstory: it’s the manuscript of McNamara’s hunt for a man she dubbed the Golden State Killer in a widely read article in Los Angeles magazine in 2013. McNamara died in her sleep in 2016, leaving her book unfinished. The book has been pieced together by her research assistant and her husband, comedian Patton Oswalt, and issued with a strong introduction by Gillian Flynn. McNamara was a dogged researcher and, as the transcripts included in the book show, a skilled interviewer. She connected with all sorts of people interested in and working on the case, about a serial rapist and murderer who terrorized California from Sacramento to the East Bay and finally to the south in Orange County. Her research combined the opinions of cops, criminalists, and other amateur sleuths like herself, many of whom knew her from her popular blog, True Crime Diary. Her strong and likable narrative voice is missed in the sections pieced together from her research, but Dark is still a powerful true crime book, which would have been even better had McNamara lived to finish it.