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If you suddenly become bored and it seems that nothing interesting is happening in life, then it’s time to read a detective story. We offer you five novelties of this genre that will help you pass the autumn evenings with pleasure.
1. The Thursday Murder Club. Richard Thomas Osman. MIF, 2021
In a nursing home nestled in a peaceful rural landscape, four friends meet weekly in a break room to discuss unsolved crimes. They call themselves the Thursday Murder Club.
Elisabeth, Joyce, Ibrahim and Ron are in their eighties now, but they still have a few tricks up their sleeves.
When a local construction worker is found dead and a mysterious photograph is found next to the body, the Thursday Murder Club suddenly gets its first real case. Soon the number of corpses begins to grow. Can our extraordinary team catch the killer before it’s too late?
2. “The face on the milk carton.” Caroline Cooney. Bombora, 2021
One day, Jenny, the most ordinary American schoolgirl, sees a picture of a missing girl on a carton of milk. Nothing remarkable: pigtails, a polka-dot dress with a white collar. But Jenny understands that this dress is now lying in the attic of her parents’ house, and in the photo – herself.
“Stolen from a mall in New Jersey at the age of three. If you see this child, call the number … ”Jenny cannot believe that her loving family is capable of crime, and biological father and mother have been looking for their daughter for twelve years. Then why are there no baby pictures in her house, and why does she look so different from those whom she always considered her parents?
The girl will have to start her own investigation to find out who she really is. The idea of the novel arose from a common practice in the United States in the 80s and 90s, when photographs of missing children were placed on tetra-packs with milk. American writer and winner of many literary awards Caroline B. Cooney creates on this basis a detective-psychological thriller in five parts, the tension in which is on the rise.
3. “Justisman”. That’s Son. AST 2021
A series of murders carried out in a similar manner – each of the victims had two bullet holes in their foreheads – causes public murmurs. In these terrible traces of crimes, in the way bloody splashes and smudges scattered over the wall and surroundings, there is something reminiscent of the work of the famous abstract artist Jackson Pollock.
While the police are unable to determine the motives and get on the trail of the killer, someone under the nickname Justiceman appears on the Internet. He is the administrator of a rapidly growing forum where a series of mysterious murders is discussed. His posts, in which he demonstrates an amazing ability to analyze facts and build them in a logical chain, are gaining more and more trust among members of the forum.
And now Justiceman already has more than half a million loyal followers, and the opinion of this community, in turn, becomes the ultimate truth …
4. “Memoirs of a killer.” Kim Yongha. AST, 2021
The protagonist is a former serial killer who left his job twenty-five years ago. The bodies of his victims are buried in a bamboo forest; his adopted daughter Eunhee is the child of the last woman he killed. But he is forced to return to the bloody craft.
In the area where the hero lives, one after another, murders began to occur, and a suspicious young man, driving around in a hunting jeep, began to look after Eunhee. Is this really true or is it all happening only in the imagination of a serial killer losing his mind?
The author skillfully makes the reader doubt the reality of the events described. After it becomes known that the protagonist suffers from Alzheimer’s disease, the reader gets to know this seventy-year-old man in a desperate struggle for fading memories.
The book, whose brief chapters are like a hero’s fleeting memory, brings the reader to an unexpected ending that turns the entire previous narrative upside down. The cycle of elusive memories and illusions drags the hero in and destroys the unreliable structure he erected, which until now seemed to be his real past.
5. “Dark Arts”. Oscar de Muriel. Inspiration, 2021
1889, Edinburgh. A large family hosts a séance, a popular pastime of the Victorian era. A fortune-teller named Madame Katherine is invited to see him off. But the next morning after the session, all those invited are dead – with the exception of Katerina. The fortune teller faces execution for killing six, but she swears that she is innocent.
To unravel this mysterious case will be two inspectors of the Scottish police – Nine-fingered McGray, known for his ebullient nature and love of the occult sciences, and Ian Frey, a prim dandy with excellent deductive abilities. Frey and McGray are waiting for a lot of tests – from a judicial confrontation with the meanest prosecutor in the city to a meeting with the underworld itself.