May’s best thrillers — a suicide bomber in LA and a new Stephen King (2024)

Hunted by Abir Mukherjee

Abir Mukherjee’s remarkable first thriller — a departure from his award-winning Wyndham and Banerjee crime series — follows a terrorist crisis during a US presidential election campaign. Opening with a suicide bomber killing 65 people in a Los Angeles mall, it climaxes with a threat to both candidates and their supporters at final rallies in Florida. In between, Shreya Mistry, an FBI agent, traces the cell responsible to the northwest, pursues two of its members across America, gradually realises that another pair of FBI targets are the innocent parents of brainwashed jihadists, and comes to question whether Islamism really underlies the bombings.

Hunted is a phenomenal achievement, with its sizeable cast of memorable characters, flawless juggling of multiple storylines, and a political dimension that makes it more than pacey entertainment. You could be forgiven (such is his assurance) for imagining that Mukherjee’s career has been devoted to conspiracy thrillers set in a near-future America, rather than Indian historical mysteries.
Harvill Secker; £14.99

Invasion by Frank Gardner

China is threatening to invade Taiwan in the fourth spy thriller by the BBC security correspondent. In London, dim politicians dispatch gunboats and top spooks fret. Across east Asia, ships move into position, soldiers test enemy defences and their own futuristic kit, and spies hack phones, use blackmail and launch huge cyberattacks. Threaded through all this, Gardner’s series hero, MI6 officer Luke Carlton, is sent to rescue a civilian MI6 asset — Hannah, a climate scientist — who was kidnapped in Hong Kong when collecting a microchip containing China’s biggest secrets.

Everything is impressive in this masterly account of the build-up, from its exhilarating (if alarming) topicality to the size and diversity of its multinational cast. But then Gardner blows it all with a perfunctory denouement, frustratingly leaving us with a thriller that’s only 95 per cent marvellous. Which suggests you can either have a 21st-century James Bond saga or a credible, meticulously researched geopolitical crisis scenario, but not both.
Bantam; £18.99

When We Were Silent by Fiona McPhillips

In 1986 Lou, a working-class girl, enters a snooty, sporty Dublin private school vowing to take down Mr McQueen, the swimming coach whose abuse caused a friend’s suicide. Her scheme to expose him ends tragically, however, and she’s put on trial. Thirty years later — in a transformed country where victims are no longer silent — another case involving Highfield Manor compels Lou (now a feminist lecturer at Trinity College Dublin) to come to terms with her past and seek out her estranged schoolfriends. In McPhillips’s angry, accomplished debut the nun-run girls’ school forms part (along with the media, pop culture, the courts, the Church and Lou’s neighbourhood) of an arresting picture of everyday Eighties misogyny, which her later narrative shows as still lingering despite Ireland’s shedding of much of its patriarchal past.
Bantam; £16.99

You Like It Darker by Stephen King

All of the protagonists are men, usually middle-aged or retired, in King’s 12th collection of shorter fiction, which displays his familiar, unmatched ability to embed moments of fantasy or horror (a paranormal event or epiphany, a murder, a trusted figure revealed as a monster) in otherwise social-realist tales of mundane lives in middle America. Although there are no duds, their narrative shape — normal, normal, slightly perturbing, gulp! — does become predictable. That’s why reading them one at a time is preferable to bingeing, and why the outstanding piece is the 146-page Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream, in which a school caretaker has a vision of a girl’s murder. Its novella length makes it more unsettling by disrupting King’s usual rhythm — jolting bumps in the narrative road could potentially happen anywhere, not just at journey’s end.
Hodder & Stoughton; £25

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