Sunburn (Faber, £14.99), Laura Lippman’s homage to the hardboiled, morally ambiguous novels of James M Cain, has the texture and many of the tropes of classic American noir but is set in 1995. Tired of her loveless marriage and limited horizons, beautiful redhead Polly Costello walks out on husband Gregg and young daughter Jani during a beach holiday and fetches up in the one-horse town of Belleville, Delaware, where she takes a job in the High-Ho bar-slash-restaurant. Here, she meets Adam Bosk, and a flirtation commences. It soon becomes clear that Adam knows more about Polly than he is letting on, and that her past is infinitely more complicated than either Adam or Gregg realise, and the skeletons in the cupboard begin to pile perilously high. Lippman uses multiple narrators and controls the flow of information masterfully in this tantalising, ingeniously constructed page-turner.
Righteous by Joe Ide (W&N, £14.99) picks up where the author’s award-winning first novel, IQ, left off: Isaiah Quintabe is still living in East Long Beach, California, solving the minor problems of his neighbourhood and obsessing over the mysterious death of his older brother, Marcus. Just as he begins to make progress, Sarita Van, who was Marcus’s fiancee and for whom Isaiah has long held a torch, asks him to find her sister. Janine is a Las Vegas DJ who, together with her loser boyfriend, has run up gambling debts, and the pair are being pursued by a loan shark. Isaiah persuades his friend Dodson – a former offender who is the Watson to his Sherlock Holmes – to help, and the duo find themselves up against a cast of criminals, including sex traffickers, Chinese mobsters and money launderers, some of whom have disturbing information about Marcus’s death. Witty and confident, with a bustling plot and a protagonist who is both original and appealing, this is a worthy follow-up to Ide’s excellent debut.
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