Guardian Review

Miles Franklin award winner Peter Temple, who died in March this year, was an Australian crime writing pioneer. He paved the way for the talents of Jane Harper and Emma Viskic - and now Chris Hammer, whose debut novel Scrublands (Wildfire, £16.99) is already a bestseller there. This sharply observed slice of outback noir makes good use of its closed-world setting: a sun-baked, drought-ravaged town whose remaining inhabitants live with the ever-present threat of an all-consuming bushfire. A mass shooting by a young priest, who is himself shot dead by the local police officer, gets the media's attention, and one year later journalist Martin Scarsden is dispatched to write a human interest piece on how the town is coping. He discovers that a lot of people have things to hide - and then two bodies turn up in the local dam. The clunkier elements - Scarsden's emotional baggage, and his on-off romance with a much younger woman - are more than compensated for by well-rounded characters, masterful plotting and real breadth; this is an epic and immersive read. Scandinavia is not normally associated with excessive sunshine, but the lowlife cast of the final volume in Martin Holmén's Stockholm saga, Slugger (Pushkin Vertigo, £8.99, translated by Annie Prime), are tormented by an unprecedented heatwave. This is a truly dark portrait of the city - sweaty, sleazy, corrupt and brutal - and, because it's 1936, the political climate is also hotting up with the rise of a pro-Nazi movement. Boxer turned enforcer Harry Kvist starts asking questions when the body of his friend and former lover Pastor Gabrielsson is found murdered in his church with a star of David daubed in blood on the floor beside him. The investigation isn't easy - not only are the police more interested in antisemitic rumours than the truth, but he finds himself caught up in a turf war between two of the city's most vicious gangs. Tragic and moving, with a spectacular denouement, it's a fitting ending to a superb trilogy. Told from a kaleidoscope of different points of view, Good Samaritans by Will Carver (Orenda, £8.99) is a blend of serial killer thriller and domestic noir. Suicidal Hadley wants a friendly ear, but what she initially thinks is a call-back from the Samaritans turns out to be insomniac Seth, who spends his nights dialling people at random, "hoping for some connection". His marriage is in the doldrums; wife Maeve seems only interested in schlocky television shows and news reports of a murder investigation into young women whose bodies are found dumped in the countryside. Samaritan Ant, felling guilt about a friend's death, spends his nights listening to other people's problems, and Detective Sergeant Pace is bewildered by a killer who uses bleach on his victims to eradicate all forensic traces. Carver weaves these strands together for an unsettling but compelling mixture of the banal, the horrific and, at times, the near-comic, wrong-footing the reader at every turn. There's also a fair bit of bleach action in Lizzy Barber's first novel, My Name Is Anna (Century, £12.99), as the devoutly Christian mother of the eponymous teenager scrubs away literal and metaphorical stains. She and her daughter live a secluded life in Florida, until a secret visit to a forbidden theme park leaves Anna positive that she has been to the place before, and the anonymous gift of an oddly familiar pendant compounds the feeling that there is a mystery in her past. Meanwhile, in London, 16-year-old Rosie learns that the trust set up to find her older sister, who disappeared 15 years ago, has run out of money, and she decides to conduct her own investigation ... It's not difficult to join the dots, and having Anna and Rosie pass the narrative baton between them risks putting the reader ahead of the game, but Barber has created characters with sufficient appeal to fuel real suspense. Night of Camp David by Fletcher Knebel (Vintage, £8.99) was described by the New York Times as "a little too plausible for comfort" when it was first published in 1965. Fifty-three years later, this political thriller, which is set in what was then the future (1976), has dated in some ways but, in the light of both Watergate and current events, seems eerily prescient. President Mark Hollenbach is a paranoiac who sees conspiracy everywhere, wants to introduce wiretapping on all phones, and is intent on turning his back on existing alliances and organising a summit with the Soviet premier with the aim of forming a nuclear coalition. The young senator Hollenbach takes into his confidence fears that the president has lost his mind and tries to persuade his colleagues to act, but it's an uphill task. The ending is something of a damp squib, but this may be because, in the words of Mark Twain, "Truth is stranger than fiction, but that is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; truth isn't." - Laura Wilson.