ANDY HEDGECOCK is entertained by a playful novel that embeds a fictional game at its heart
LARA THOMPSON’S One Night, New York (Virago, £14.99) begins on a winter night in 1932. Two women wait at the top of the Empire State Building to see whether their plan to take an awful revenge on a powerful man, guilty of unforgivable crimes against them, will work.
And they’re waiting, too, to see whether either of them will be able to bring themselves to carry it out.
From the Dust Bowl of the Great Depression to a New York changing forever as the tenement-dwellers are forced to make way for the skyscrapers, this is an elegantly written debut.
KEN COCKBURN relishes the memoir of a translator, but wonders whether the autobiography underlying the impulse would make a better book
Timeloop murder, trad family MomBomb, Sicilian crime pages and Craven praise
A heatwave, a crimewave, and weird bollocks in Aberdeen, Indiana horror, and the end of the American Dream
Reasonable radicalism, death in Abu Dhabi, locked-room romance, and sleuthing in the Blitz



