The latest crime fiction: women provide their own take on sexual violence

Having long escaped their relegation to the softer margins of the thriller genre, women writers have provided their own take on grimmer themes, including the sexual violence that has become such a staple of crime writing today. In The Eye of the Beholder by Margie Orford (Canongate, £16.99), Cora Berger is a South African painter who moved to London after her parents were killed in a car accident. Outwardly formidable, she has a penchant for creepy, dominating men, and finds herself under the spell of a wealthy art collector named Fournier, who has a cabin tucked away deep in the Canadian wilderness.

We are also introduced to Angel, a much younger woman who has a violent history – the result of horrendous sexual exploitation at the hands of her stepfather. Only recently released from prison, she now works for a conservation organisation, tracking the local population of wolves – an apt metaphor for someone once the victim of human ones. The two women, superficially quite different, overlap in Canada, and are linked by Fournier, whose initial charm hides a taste for sado-masochistic sex and particularly depraved pornography.

As the novel progresses, we move variously between Canada, London, Scotland and South Africa, and each of the widely differing settings is vividly portrayed; the descriptive writing is especially good. Slowly, the painful histories of Cora and Angel emerge, and these reveals are well handled, with none of the awkwardness that often arises when a story is put on hold while its characters’ histories are recounted. This is ultimately a novel about sexual violence, and may trouble some readers, especially male ones, who will notice that the few sympathetic men have only minor roles. But both the villainy of the abuse endured by the women and the stark violence of the revenge they eventually exact ring disturbingly true.

Small Deaths by Rijula Das (Amazon Crossing, £11) is a real find – a masterly debut, issued somewhat improbably by the translation arm of the behemoth’s publishing division. Tilu Shau is a hack novelist and humdrum member of a low caste in today’s Kolkata. He falls in love with Lalee, who works and lives in the Blue Lotus, a brothel presided over by the redoubtable Shefali Madam. When another working resident of the Blue Lotus is found horribly murdered – acid has disfigured her face – the police respond with characteristic indifference, and Lalee is moved upstairs to take the dead woman’s place. The romantic Tilu determines to rescue Lalee from sexual servitude, but finds his Galahad mission obstructed by more acts of violence and by several startling secrets that he unearths.

The Blue Lotus setting initially feels clichéd – besotted clients, corrupt police and indifferent politicians. But the multiple points of view are expertly handled and give every character a distinct and vivid self. Even the minor ones resonate, including the solitary fan of Tilu’s fiction, a European escort prized for her whiteness, and Deepa, a middle-class NGO worker, and her Parsi husband. The plot is deftly managed, moving almost effortlessly to the bittersweet ending. This is a highly accomplished debut.

Suspect by Scott Turow (Swift Press, £20) arrives, unusually for this writer, equipped with a female protagonist, which looks at first to be a gamble that won’t pay off. The veteran Turow works awfully hard to establish contemporary credentials: Pinky, his heroine, is a bisexual private investigator, adorned with tattoos and a facial piercing, and is often crass – the delicious Mexican carnitas in a favourite restaurant ‘rival a G-spot orgasm’. But once she gets to grips with her latest case, she starts to grow on the reader, proving both self-aware and savvy.

At the start of the novel, the local police chief, Lucia Gomez, is accused of sexual harassment by three male officers. Pinky’s employer, an attorney named Rik Dudek, is an old friend of Lucia’s and represents her at the tribunal that follows; he also includes Pinky in his meetings. To their surprise, it turns out there is something to the charges: the chief admits she has had sex with two of the officers, but with their consent. Why then are the men pressing charges?

The answer is only gradually arrived at, as Pinky uncovers a series of ancillary plots that slowly come together. Characters include a sinister, mysterious neighbour, known by Pinky as the Weird One, whom she cynically seduces after all efforts to discover what he is up to fail. As with any Turow novel, unexpected revelations vary the pace and keep us keen to follow a complicated plot. If the pleasures of the story are largely predictable, they are nonetheless considerable.

In Impossible by Erri de Luca, translated by N.S. Thompson (Mountain Leopard Press, £14.99), two men have been walking separately in Italy’s Dolomites when one of them falls to his death. A local magistrate becomes convinced that he was pushed off the mountain by the surviving hiker. The interrogations that follow constitute the core of this lean, engaging novel, supplemented by letters the accused man writes to his partner back home.

Incriminating facts gradually emerge. The accused is a factory worker of radical political persuasions, and the dead man was a former comrade, who betrayed him by revealing a terrorist plot to the authorities. The accused has spent several years in prison as a result. More links between the two men surface, as the prosecutor labours to extract a confession from the impenitent – or innocent (we can’t be sure) – protagonist. There is a final ingenious move by the investigating magistrate that the accused just manages to evade.

A plot summary does not do justice to the way in which this almost skeletal narrative captivates. The writing is equally spare, but has a profound lyric intensity – or at least the English translation does. One ends uncertain about what really happened high in the desolate Dolomite peaks, and not quite sure why the mystery is so transfixing. But it is.