Things feel very tense out there in the nonfictional world, so this month’s thrillers are designed to provide escape, not terror.
The French Illusion
by John Grisham
Let’s start with THE FRENCH ILLUSION (Doubleday, 352 pp., $35) and the thwarted honeymoon plans of the newly married American couple Paul and Chelsea Tanner. Instead of visiting the D-Day museum in Caen, France, they are abducted and pumped full of ketamine in the back of a limousine. “Shut up,” an unfriendly man tells Chelsea when she wakes up in what appears to be a windowless cell, shoving a thick hood over her head. “We have your phone. What is the access code?”
Back home, Chelsea’s mother, who has been low-grade annoyed at her daughter’s compulsion to chronicle every post-wedding move on Instagram (“It often seemed to her as if her own children and their friends spent more time posing and posturing then actually enjoying the sights,” Grisham writes), grows alarmed when a whole day passes without a single update. All too soon, she and the other parents will find out what the kidnappers want.
Grisham has written dozens of books since his first, “A Time to Kill,” in 1989, but this is the only one that can be called an espionage novel. It turns out that the Tanners aren’t the only couple to have had their French honeymoon cut short in this dreadful manner. Soon, all manner of agencies — the F.B.I., the C.I.A., the State Department, Interpol — are drawn in to stop what turns out to be a coordinated plot.
Inside a book that leans heavily into procedural details — painstaking accounts of phone calls, meetings, trips to the bank, descriptions of people waiting around for news — lurks a timely commentary on American foreign policy and lawlessness in war. There’s mention of John le Carré: A couple of the characters are fans, though they agree that they find his later works “less enjoyable” than his Cold War fiction, possibly because they’re suffused with moral outrage. Grisham, though, takes a page from le Carré; there’s righteous anger to be found here, too.
Murder at the Grand Alpine Hotel
by Lucy Foley and Agatha Christie
Following the (sensible) premise that there’s always room for another Christie novel, along comes Foley’s MURDER AT THE GRAND ALPINE HOTEL (Morrow, 295 pp., $30). Authorized by the Christie estate, it features everyone’s favorite deceptively fuzzy senior citizen, Miss Marple.
The place: the Swiss Alps, 1950. The cast: an unscrupulous Tory politician, his naïve, dutiful young wife and an outré American actress, among others. And, of course, Miss Marple, who has ventured out of her comfort zone in the provincial English town of St. Mary Mead to enjoy the mountain air with her widowed friend and regular sidekick, Dolly Bantry.
A snowstorm sets in, cutting off the hotel from the rest of the world just as the first body is discovered, curled on the floor of a ski gondola. “Of course it could have been a suicide,” Miss Marple muses, “but it seems unlikely to me that one would go to all the effort of getting dressed for skiing.”
The plot is even better than it needs to be. Christie-o-philes will delight in allusions to previous cases (“The Body in the Library”; “At Bertram’s Hotel”) and everyone will appreciate the foolish under-appreciation of Miss Marple by some of the more ill-advised characters. “Maybe this is some assist-the-demented-elderly scheme,” thinks one uncharitable fellow, when he learns that she will be helping in the police inquiries. Little does he know.
We Chase Shadows
by Richard Osman
Like many fans of the retirement community detectives in Osman’s “Thursday Murder Club” books, I was leery when he began a new series whose main characters fly around the world tackling international conspiracies instead of remaining close to home. But I loved the first one, “We Solve Murders” — starring Amy Wheeler, a private security officer; Steve, her retired cop father-in-law; and Rosie D’Antonio, a fabulously rich and impossibly glamorous best-selling author — and I’m happy to report that its successor, WE CHASE SHADOWS (Pamela Dorman Books, 341 pp., $31), is just as delicious.
The new book finds the trio, now running the We Solve Murders detective agency, waiting around for a new case. It comes from Vern Blackwood, a rich fake-vitamin magnate who describes himself as “a sort of criminal, but not really.” He would like them to investigate the demise of one of his bodyguards, whose murdered corpse has just been dumped on his doorstep, alongside an ominous note that begins “This is a waning.” (“English not his first language, then,” Steve notes.)
Osman doesn’t dwell much on the tragedy of death (“You know there’s still food in the bottom of this freezer? Underneath the corpse,” Amy says at one point) and is, as always, satisfyingly nonjudgmental about even his less morally upright characters. Cat-lovers will be pleased at the reappearance of Steve’s wiser-than-he-looks cat, Trouble.
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