Ink Ribbon Red
Alex Pavesi
Michael Joseph/Penguin, 400 pages, $25.99
Alex Pavesi, bestselling author of the 2020 debut “Eight Detectives,” returns with another postmodern, metafictional take on the traditional murder mystery. In the earlier book, the British writer used stories within stories to tease out the truth about a real crime buried in the fictional work of a noted mystery author.
In this followup, Pavesi does something similar, challenging his readers to parse the truth from the lies among stories written by weekend party guests at a country estate. The six, gathered to celebrate one member’s 30th birthday, are challenged to choose two names — a killer and a victim — from among the guests and describe their imagined murders.
But Pavesi ups the stakes by not making clear which parts of the novel are stories in the game and which are “real.” The author, a PhD in mathematics with a love of puzzles, puts his enthusiasms to good effect in a book that is itself a kind of literary puzzle box that only occasionally recalls its predecessor’s approach a bit too closely.
Sweet Fury
Sash Bischoff
Simon & Schuster Canada, 288 pages, $24.99
This year marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece “The Great Gatsby.” In advance of this, debut novelist Sash Bischoff presents a story about an actor and her film-director fiancé embarking on a feminist retelling of Fitzgerald’s “Tender Is the Night.” The actor, Lila Crayne, simultaneously embarks on a course of therapy with the biblically named psychoanalyst Jonah Gabriel, an interaction that will resurface buried trauma and fraught relationships from her past.
This crafty novel uses the author’s experience as a theatre director to good effect in behind-the-scenes on-set sequences, while the relationship between Lila and Jonah cagily recalls the central characters in “Tender Is the Night,” themselves a therapist and his troubled patient-turned-wife (the latter based closely on Fitzgerald’s own wife, Zelda). Trying to stay one step ahead of who is playing whom accounts for most of the book’s pleasures, which are only marred by a few too many self-conscious Fitzgerald references and allusions.
Angélique
Guillaume Musso; translated by Rosie Eyre
Little, Brown, 288 pages, $24.99
Contemporary crime novels tend to elevate jaw-dropping plot twists above character and nuance; in this regard, bestselling French writer Guillaume Musso’s 2022 novel, now translated into English, is a hold-my-beer experience. Nominally the story of Mathias Taillefer, a retired policier recovering from a heart attack who is approached by the daughter of a famous dancer claiming that her mother’s supposedly accidental death was actually murder, the book’s breakneck reversals and revelations threaten to give the reader whiplash.
As the narrative unfolds, it begins to centre on the titular character, a nurse who briefly attended to the dead ballerina. But is she everything she seems? Is anyone? By the time the reader reaches the end of this relentless, one-sitting read, it becomes apparent that nothing can be taken for granted. The pileup of revelations ultimately beggars belief, but Musso’s tale — the literary equivalent of a Luc Besson cinematic thriller — goes by too quickly to notice.
I Died on a Tuesday
Jane Corry
Doubleday Canada, 480 pages, $24.95
Musso cannily keeps his narrative confined to a crisp and efficient page count; not so UK author Jane Corry, whose latest mystery runs almost 500 pages, offering plenty of opportunities for a reader to succumb to exhaustion and for cracks in the plot to show through.
“I Died on a Tuesday” concerns a hit and run in an English seaside town that left a 17-year-old aspiring publisher and novelist hideously injured and unable to speak. Two decades after the tragic event, international pop sensation Robbie Manning is arrested for the crime and imprisoned. Is he really responsible or is his guilty plea simply an attempt to save his family the pain of a trial?
A subplot involving an elderly widow whose late husband worked the case, and who has just been contacted by a grandson she never knew existed, quickly becomes repetitive and slows the pace in the first half, forcing Corry to race through Robbie’s trial at a ridiculous clip in the second. As with Musso, no one in this book is who they seem; unlike Musso, the self-indulgent length means that the longer the story goes on, the less we care about each successive — and increasingly unbelievable — plot twist.
