The best recent crime and thrillers, review roundup

The Heights by Ian Rankin; The Mortons by Scott Westerfeld and Justine Larbalestier; Murder Most Cryptic by Alys Cummings; The Deadly Inheritance of Everest Macdonald by AJ West; Inheritance by Gillian Slovo

The Heights by Ian Rankin (Orion, £25) Luxury tower blocks, those potent symbols of hyper-gentrification, the increasing wealth gap and the displacement of existing communities, are a gift to novelists. Rankin’s first standalone thriller in almost two decades centres on The Heights, 18 storeys high and facing London’s Hyde Park, where DS Gillian Gish is investigating the suspicious death of night-shift security guard Dwayne Hogarth. The high-net-worth individuals who live there, including a young singer, a gangster’s wife, a man who “made a mint in post-glasnost Russia” and the daughter of a very well-connected Zimbabwean, are either uncontactable or tight-lipped, and it soon becomes clear that the developer, despite his bravado, is in financial trouble. Everyone, it appears, has something to hide, and then a second corpse is discovered. Rankin is a superb storyteller, and this is well up to his usual high standard, while DS Gish, less complex, but considerably more relatable than John Rebus, is worthy of her own series.

The Mortons by Scott Westerfeld & Justine Larbalestier (Viking, £18.99) There are shades of both The Sopranos and Wednesday Addams in this tale of a powerful old American family whose trade is murder, blackmail and financial fraud. As the Mortons’ great hope, Jessica, puts it, “Give your child a strong hand, a sharp knife, and a big family, then teach them loyalty without care.” The children are given pet rabbits on which to prove their lack of compassion; the family are as ruthless with their own as with everyone else, their graveyard being full of youngsters who failed to make the grade. Jessica, who achieved her first kill aged 20, looks set to take on the murderous mantle, but a summer internship leads to a train of events that culminate in the discovery of a conscience. The Mortons is vivid and exciting, with a nice vein of mordant humour, but there’s a lot of world-building to get through, some of it lacking in internal logic; it’s hard to keep track of the many characters, and the violence towards innocent people and animals may leave some readers feeling queasy.

Murder Most Cryptic by Alys Cummings (Michael Joseph, £16.99) Cummings’s entertaining debut begins with a man walking into a meeting of people in recovery, announcing that his name is Laurence and he’s an alcoholic, then dropping dead. The group, who spot a handwritten cryptic crossword clue that’s fallen out of Laurence’s pocket, answer: Murder, are quicker to suspect foul play than the police, and when the same clue appears in the following day’s newspaper, they decide to figure out what’s going on. Told from the points of view of people trying, with varying degrees of success, to remain sober, this book involves a fair amount of unreliable narration, not least because of the memory gaps of the blackout drunk. The emergence of pertinent backstories lends rather more emotional depth than is found in the average cosy, while the discovery of further cryptic crossword clues provides an ingenious puzzle element (answers given at the end for non-cruciverbalists).

The Deadly Inheritance of Everest Macdonald by AJ West (Orenda, £20) West’s latest historical mystery is a re-imagining of real events: actor William Terris was stabbed to death outside London’s Adelphi theatre in 1897 by deranged and destitute fellow performer Richard Archer Prince, who was subsequently found “criminally insane” and sent to Broadmoor. The action here takes place in 1917, against the backdrop of the first world war, as Everest Macdonald’s father, brother of William, hands her a packet of papers and charges her with finding out the truth about her uncle’s death. What follows is a fascinating journey that takes us back to the Indian sepoy rebellion of 1857 and encompasses “blackmail in all directions, secret love affairs, loyalties, vendettas, even phantoms and tribal curses”, as well as a plethora of hysterical thespians including real-life stars of the turn-of-the-century British stage such as Herbert Beerbohm Tree and Seymour Hicks. Well-researched, atmospheric and suitably melodramatic, this is a rip-roaring read-at-one-sitting historical mystery.

Inheritance by Gillian Slovo (Peepal Tree, £12.99) The eponymous inheritance of Slovo’s latest novel involves political and financial corruption in a South Africa still emerging from the long shadows cast by apartheid. Novelist Deborah Harrison’s younger sister Gail killed herself after denouncing Deborah’s latest book, a re-imagining of the family tragedy that blighted their childhood, as a misrepresentation. Deborah has always accepted the official version of events, that her mother killed her father in 1984 and went to prison for it, but Gail, whose adulthood was blighted by addiction issues and escalating paranoia, maintained that this was not the case. Now she has left a will tasking her sister with finding their now-released mother, with whom they have had no contact for over 40 years, and Deborah discovers that the truth is far more complicated than she has been led to believe. This is a suspenseful and moving tale about generational trauma, the complex nature of memory, making peace and letting go.