The Saw franchise might have jumped the shark many sequels ago, but luckily for those of us who are suckers for this kind of set-piece story, we now have Simon Kernick’s new thriller, You All Die Tonight (Headline). Our setting: a remote mansion in the Essex countryside. Our cast: seven people, who wake from a drugged sleep to find themselves in said mansion. As they meet, they discover they do, in fact, know one another – they are all linked in some way to the Black Lake massacre, which took place four years earlier and is “one of this country’s most heinous unsolved crimes”. There’s the disgraced police officer who failed to solve the case, the brother of one of the victims; the victim’s business partner… you get the picture. Then a disembodied voice speaks to let them know they have all been injected “with a slow-acting poison… an extremely rare combination of chemicals that will be very hard to detect, and therefore to treat medically”. Basically: find out who did it, or die. “If you’re innocent, you need to find out who committed this crime. If you’re guilty, your only chance of a quick death is to unburden yourself,” they’re told. Cue a jumping back and forth in time as we circle in on our killers – it might not be as grisly as Saw, but this is an enjoyably preposterous set-up, with a gratifyingly grimy bunch of suspects.
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In Observer Magazine assistant editor Emma Cook’s debut novel, You Can’t Hurt Me (Orion), Anna is a journalist who takes on a job of a lifetime: ghostwriting the memoir of Dr Nate Reid, a celebrity neuroscientist who is “dedicated to observing human pain in all its infinite variety”. Nate wants her to write about his groundbreaking work in his lab, studying pain (“Someone once described it to me as the white-hot core of human experience, and I think that’s accurate,” he tells her); Anna wants to delve into his relationship with his late wife, Eva, and into Eva’s death, which still has questions around it. Eva had a congenital insensitivity to pain, a mutation that prevented her from feeling pain or anxiety; she started out as Nate’s patient and became his wife. Cook moves between Anna’s story in the present, Eva’s diary in the past (“I’m Teflon-coated. How can you be truly broken-hearted, for instance, without feeling the physical ache inside?”), and the memoir Anna and Nate are crafting together to peel away the truth at the heart of a toxic marriage – and to show that Anna might be hiding secrets of her own. Elegantly written, this is an atmospheric and disturbing thriller.
Amanda Jennings’s Beautiful People (HQ) opens with a bang – the body of a man on the terrace during a fancy wedding, dead, his belly, rather brilliantly, “full of flash-fried venison, Courvoisier, and unchecked entitlement”; a woman beside him, looking down, feeling “not even a pinch” of guilt. We then meet our protagonist, Victoria, an up-and-coming painter who has been invited to the wedding of the century as she’s painted a portrait of the bride, hot young actor Ingrid. But it turns out that Ingrid is marrying one of Victoria’s old friends, Julian – and Victoria is catapulted back into memories of her early days at university in London. From a troubled family background, she reinvented herself to fit in with a glittering friendship group, falling in love with her housemate Nick and desperately clinging on to this new world until something terrible happens. Jennings is good at moving her story back and forth between a world of absolute privilege and Victoria’s horribly lonely reality; this is a well-put-together and gripping thriller: will Jennings’s baddies get their just deserts?
Winter is coming, so time to dig into Ruth Kelly’s chilling latest, The Ice Retreat (Pan), in which Hollie Jensen is out to expose the (apparently) nefarious goings-on at an exclusive wellness retreat in the Swiss mountains. Hollie is presenter of a documentary series, Bad Medicine, which exposes extreme therapies; her latest target is wellness guru Ariel Rose’s claim that she can heal pain with a three-day “ice rebirth” treatment. “The extreme cold brings about a series of physiological reactions that help the body to repair, recover and reinvigorate,” we are told, scientifically. When Hollie, who is burning with rage much of the time so we know there’ll be past secrets of her own to reveal, is invited to the Ice Retreat by Ariel’s PR, she’s determined to uncover the truth – cue lots of sneaking around empty corridors at night in a stunningly beautiful but dangerous setting. This is somewhat tangled, but ends with a fun helter-skelter race to the finish line and a great twist.