Andrew Taylor
On one level, Tokyo Year Zero (Faber, £16.99) by David Peace is a murder mystery; on another it is a grimly effective exploration of Tokyo a year after the end of the second world war. Peace creates — or recreates? — a nightmarish vision of a society in disintegration, both physically and morally. Not for the squeamish, but this is a book that travels deep into its very own heart of darkness.
A different sort of darkness is investigated in Jeff Lindsay's Dexter in the Dark (Orion, £9.99), whose central character is a Miami crime scene investigator and part-time psychopathic killer. With ingredients like that, the novel should be both nauseating and derivative, but it's neither. It is dark, original, and often very funny — like the Dexter series as a whole.
In Losing You (Michael Joseph, £12.99), Nicci French gives a brilliant demonstration of how simple a very good thriller can be: a teenage girl goes missing on the Essex coast; in a single day, her mother tries with increasing desperation to track her down, and in the process finds out more about her daughter than she ever suspected. A book to chill the heart of every parent.
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