Shrines of Gaiety, by Kate Atkinson
It’s London, 1926. Nellie Coker, nightclub owner, has just been released from a short stint in prison into the waiting arms of her children. She's ready to get back to business at the nightclub empire she funded with jewels stolen from a dead landlady, but mysterious forces are conspiring against her. Someone’s coming for her clubs, and they’re apparently being assisted by corrupt police officers. Meantime, two young runaways from York — Freda and Florence — are somewhere in London, trying to make it big on the stage. Searching for them is Gwendolen Kelling, family friend of one of the girls, erstwhile librarian, and a woman who has no more f*cks to give after the horrors of her WWI battlefield nursing experience. Gwendolen goes to the police for help and starts working with DCI Frobisher, a decent-hearted detective with a complicated home life, who sends her semi-undercover into one of the Cokers’ clubs to look for signs of the girls. All this is happening against the backdrop of a grim trend: the bodies of young women are being pulled from the Thames. This is closer in tone to Atkinson’s wonderful Jackson Brodie series than to Life After Life (which everyone else loved but which I couldn’t get into). It’s a reading delight despite the death toll; it’s fun, plot- and character-heavy, and a fascinating glimpse of the era.
Shutter, by Ramona Emerson
This crime novel begins with the literary equivalent of an extended tracking shot: Rita Todacheene, a forensic photographer, examines one gory piece of evidence after another on an Albuquerque highway, where a woman landed after jumping or being thrown from an overpass. Rita also sees the ghosts of the dead, who have been talking to her since she was a child living on a Navajo reservation. They’re not all benign presences, either. Erma, the overpass victim, says she was murdered and harangues Rita mercilessly to find the men who did it, even as the lead detective decides it’s a suicide. Rita’s search for answers in the case of Erma and other possibly related (and also, heads up, grisly) crimes alternates with the story of her childhood on and off the reservation, being raised by her grandmother and mother and grappling with the gift that she learns pretty quickly to keep to herself. This isn’t the twistiest crime novel I’ve ever read, but it’s among the most atmospheric and haunting. It was long-listed for the National Book Award this year, and the ending lays the ground for a sequel, which I can’t wait to read.
All That’s Left Unsaid, by Tracey Lien
Ky Tran left Cabramatta, a Sydney suburb plagued by drug use and crime in the 1990s, for college and a career in Melbourne and barely looked back. A few years later, it’s 1996, she’s working as a newspaper reporter, and she has “trained herself to be an adult.” But then her parents, who like so many of their neighbors fled Vietnam during the war there, call with terrible news. Her younger brother Denny, has been beaten to death at a high school graduation celebration at a local restaurant, Lucky 8. Ky learns the local police are inclined to write off the crime as gang- or drug-related, despite the fact that Denny was a straight-arrow student. She also finds out that the witnesses present at the restaurant that night have told the police that they saw nothing. Using the doorstepping skills she’s acquired as a reporter, Ky decides to conduct her own interviews; we hear directly from those witnesses through their own perspectives, too. Interspersed with Ky’s investigation is the story of her younger years in Cabramatta, including her complicated relationship with her old friend Minnie, with whom she had a falling-out in high school. At the core of this beautiful first novel is the mystery of who killed Denny and why, but it’s also about friendship, how family members misunderstand each other, and the generational trauma that springs from civil war and is compounded further by being a refugee in a country that doesn’t really want you there. The last chapter hit me in the gut.