The BookBrunch team reveals what's on their bedside tables
Nicholas Clee
Lucy Foley returns to form, after what I felt was a slight misstep (The Paris Apartment), with The Midnight Feast (HarperCollins, 6 June). As in Foley's The Hunting Party and The Guest List, the setting is an exclusive retreat, here a new hotel on the Dorset coast. As in those novels too, we have a juicy collection of narcissistic, damaged, dysfunctional characters, here led by the deliciously monstrous proprietor, Francesca. There are awful tensions among them, and with the locals. (It's not unlike Louise Candlish's Our Holiday, which I wrote about in April.) It all builds towards a highly enjoyable grand dinner from hell. You have to ignore a technical issue, however. As in too many thrillers, information is concealed that, were there not a need to create tension, it would be more natural to divulge. In one of the four first-person narratives in The Midnight Feast, a character tells you that something awful happened 15 years ago, but of course doesn't tell you what it was – you'll have to get nearly to the end to find out; in a third person narrative set on the morning after the fateful night, a body is found on the beach, but no one mentions the identity or even the sex (there are careful references to 'the body') of the victim. I'm happy to go along for the ride, anyway. But the TV series Bad Sisters revealed the identity of a corpse at the outset, and nonetheless kept viewers gripped for 10 hour-long episodes.
Jo Henry
The Chain was Adrian McKinty's break-through thriller, but I have always been a huge fan of his earlier Sean Duffy series, and Gun Street Girl (Serpent's Tail) is McKinty very much on form. It's the 1980s, and DI Duffy helps police the streets of Belfast, a very rare Catholic in the RUC. Called to a double murder of an elderly couple, shortly followed by the apparent suicide of the disaffected 20-something son who was living at home, Duffy soon uncovers a much bigger story. He sports the usual untidy personal life (unfaithful girlfriends, dodgy neighbours, frequent recourse to alcohol and drugs) but he's bright and tenacious and somehow admirable despite the character flaws, while the Northern Irish background is incredibly evocative. His style reminds me of the Mick Herron books - and is therefore highly recommended.
Lucy Nathan
The Mysterious Double Death of Honey Black by Lisa Hall (Hera Books) is great fun. It's a timeslip mystery that follows Lily, a Brit who moved to LA to get into the film industry but is now a hotel cleaner. When she hits her head, she falls back in time to 1949, two weeks before the unsolved murder of starlet Honey Black. Lily becomes Honey's personal assistant, and must negotiate Honey's tangled personal relationships, Hollywood egos and outdated societal norms to save her life. This book is such a good time, evoking the spirit of 1940s Hollywood deliciously as it liberally namedrops stars like Clark Gable, Lana Turner, and a pre-fame James Dean, working as a waiter at Honey's birthday party. I'm thoroughly enjoying suspending my disbelief and letting myself be swept along on a glittering, twisty-turny adventure.
