The best recent thrillers – review roundup

The danger in Peter Heller’s The River (W&N) is so vast and so deadly that it dwarfs more human threats. Wynn and Jack are students, best friends who take the summer off from Dartmouth to canoe the Maskwa river in northern Canada. “Diehards nostalgic for the days of the voyageurs”, they are phoneless and out of contact with the civilised world as they journey down the white waters and across the lakes of this immense wilderness, “the birches just beginning to yellow, and the brightening day flushing the lake with blue, the tall grasses and the fireweed in so many shades of pink”.

But then they start to smell smoke and spot a forest fire. “Who knew how far off or how big, but bigger than any they could imagine… they didn’t say a word but the silence of it and the way it seemed to breathe scared them to the bone.” Their only way to survive is to stay ahead of it and reach Hudson Bay, but they pass a couple arguing and then, later, the man catches up with them, telling them his wife has vanished. They go back to look for her, prompting a cat-and-mouse game with a potential killer as the fire closes in on them and the white water of the falls and the rapids approaches.

The River is both beautifully written, a crisp, ice-cold immersion in the glory of the wilderness, and unbearably tense, as peril moves in on Heller’s gratifyingly competent explorers, whose deep friendship is tenderly evoked.

It is clear from the very start of Denise Mina’s Conviction (Harvill Secker) quite how much fun she – and her readers – are about to have. “There has to be a reason to tell the truth. I stopped some time ago and, let me tell you, it was great,” her narrator, Anna McDonald, tells us, going on to insist, not all that plausibly: “But I’m telling you the truth in this book.”

Anna is ostensibly a normal mum, about to send her two daughters off to school, when her husband announces he’s leaving her for her best friend and taking the kids with him. Anna can’t bear it so she buries herself in a true crime podcast about a multiple murder on a yacht in the Med and realises she used to know one of the victims.

Together with her best friend’s husband, Fin, an anorexic former rock star, she embarks on a mad quest to solve the murders, revealing on the way that she isn’t at all the person she’s been pretending to be. Mina is such a classy writer and Anna is a darkly brilliant creation, the sort of person who is told by her husband: “You’re a fantasist, you’re a threatening presence in the house, you are deeply damaged” and who admits to her readers: “I mean yes, he did make some good points.” The sort of person who reads addictively, obsessively, while she’s changing for yoga and, as Fin says, “sometimes [my wife would] leave you at home and come back hours later and you’d still be in the hall, with your coat on, reading”. Who can’t fall for a heroine like that, no matter the lies she tells?

Katie Lowe’s debut, The Furies (HarperCollins), opens with an image of a dead 16-year-old girl, dressed in white and sitting on a swing, and a woman remembering the scene years later, “not because it was horrific, nor due to some long-standing, unresolved trauma. No, my feeling is quite the opposite: a thrill, cold and sweet, in the recall.”

We then move back in time to learn of the events leading up to the murder; how Violet starts at a girls’ private school where witch trials took place in the 17th century, how she is drawn into the intense friendship circle of three girls obsessed with witchcraft and how they begin to cross some dangerous lines. Lowe is very good on the passion of teenagers for their friends, “that crush of love and hate, the cruel and rotten bliss of friendship”; the places her angry young women reach as they spiral into rage are very dark indeed.

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