Book reviewer ANNA CREER looks at three British crime novels… a university thriller, a policeman with a tragi-comic approach to crime and the mystery of a missing mother.

THE best of this selection of crime novels is Nicci French’s latest, Has Anyone Seen Charlotte Salter?, which begins at Christmas 1990 with the 50th birthday party of Alec Salter.

It’s quickly apparent that all is not well in the Salter family. The children, 15-year-old Etty and her three older brothers are wary of their father, but adore their mother, Charlotte.

Charlotte is universally admired. “She loves life. She loves people. Above all she loves her four children”. But she fails to arrive for her husband’s birthday party and her children frantically search for her for days. Charlotte Salter has vanished without a trace.

Thirty years later, Etty returns to her family home, because her father, now in his eighties, has dementia and is moving into residential care. 

Etty has changed. The “eager creature” she had been is now a lawyer, “brisk and cool and hard”. Etty has joined her brothers to clear and arrange for the sale of their father’s house.

However, their childhood friends, Greg and Morgan Ackerly decide to start a podcast about Charlotte’s disappearance, with the aim of solving the mystery. Inevitably there’s a murder and the arrival of the astute Detective Inspector Maud O’Connor from London.

This is clever crime fiction, beautifully written, about a family and a community torn apart by tragedy.

Award-winning crime writer Louise Welsh is Professor of Creative Writing at Glasgow University and it’s therefore not surprising that the university at the centre of her latest novel To the Dogs feels totally authentic.

Although the son of a criminal “hardman”, Professor Jeff Brennan is a successful academic. The principal of his university has indicated that Brennan is his preferred choice to succeed him. 

Brennan already chairs the powerful building procurement committee where decisions have to be made about the design and financing of the new Learning and Teaching Hub. But problems arise when a wealthy Saudi alumni offers a generous donation to fund the building. For some staff and students this is blood money from a repressive regime.

Brennan also has personal problems. His wayward son is arrested for drug dealing and when he breaks his bail conditions he is remanded in custody.

Eliot confesses to his father that he owes a lot of money to dangerous people and he fears for his life. After an attack in prison puts Eliot in intensive care, Brennan realises he is his father’s son “prepared to kill for his family. He would die for them too, if that was what it took to keep them safe”.

As a result, To the Dogs is a tense exploration of a decent man’s battle to protect his family from organised crime and his reputation from opposing forces within academia.

MARK Billingham has been writing acclaimed, award winning crime novels since 2001, when he first introduced his detective, Inspector Tom Thorne in Sleepyhead. Eighteen more novels in the series have followed, while David Morrisey starred as Thorne in a TV series.

However, in 2023, in The Last Dance, Billingham introduced a new detective in DS Declan Miller in the first of a series set in Blackpool. The Wrong Hands is the second.

Billingham has said that he had “become convinced… that humour and seriousness are not mutually exclusive and was itching to write something more tragi-comic in tone than anything I had written before”. 

He also says DS Miller is “enormous fun to write about” and that although crime novels are about violent death and its aftermath “that’s not all there is to life or even to death. That’s never all there is, so there are also jokes”.

DS Miller is clever and unusual. He owns pet rats, his hobby is ballroom dancing and then there are the dad jokes. His colleagues tolerate him because he’s a genius at solving crime.

However, there’s been tragedy in Miller’s life too as his wife was killed during an undercover police operation and he’s desperate to find her murderer. 

When a terrified young man brings him a briefcase containing a pair of severed hands, Miller knows that this is evidence of a contract killing by a local crime boss Wayne Cutler. Miller suspects Cutler ordered his wife’s death.

As Miller pursues Cutler’s hit-man, Desmond Draper, the hit-man, is searching for his briefcase so he can be paid by Cutler. 

Be warned, beneath the humour The Wrong Hands is as violent and brutal as most noir crime novels. Billingham will make you laugh as you shudder.