The Sunday Times pick of the best thrillers for August 2021

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CULTURE

The Sunday Times pick of the best thrillers
for August 2021
A ballet school becomes a battlefield in John Dugdale’s pick of the latest thrillers

John Dugdale
08 Aug 2021 00:01:00

Thriller of the month
The Turnout by Megan Abbott Virago £14.99
Although she’s terrific at high school mysteries too, Megan Abbott is perhaps best known for
depicting the rivalries and crises of troupes of highly strung, Lycra-clad young women —
cheerleaders in
Dare Me
, gymnasts in

You Will Know Me
. Her two worlds of education and performance come together in

The Turnout
, whose protagonists, Dara and Marie, inherited a ballet school when a car crash killed their
parents. The approach of the annual run of The Nutcracker cues a series of catastrophes: a rift
between the sisters; a fire ruining one studio; the hiring of a devil-like builder who wreaks all
kinds of chaos and seduces sheltered Marie; a death on school premises that results in
damaging publicity and visits from detectives.Abbott’s exceptional ability to conjure enclosed
subcultures is evident again in a richly immersive novel full of tiny bits of dance lore and
sharply evoked minor characters. But

The Turnout
seems more ambitious than her previous stories of imploding micro-communities, with a
greater resemblance to tragic drama. The sisters emerge from their ordeal purged of innocence
and lies, at last on the threshold of womanhood (the school having previously preserved them as
girls in adult bodies) like Clara in the ballet.
1979 by Val McDermid Little, Brown £20

“Journo noir” is flourishing in the hands of authors such as Denise Mina and Holly Watt, and
they’re joined by Val McDermid — who began her career in the 1980s with a hack as heroine —
in the series-launching 1979. Despite a perversely misleading shoutline (“She’s hunting for a
story, and someone’s hunting her”), it centres on a double act: Allie and Danny, reporters on a
Glasgow paper, collaborate on investigations of a tax fraud racket and a “Tartan terror”
nationalist cell. The storytelling is typically accomplished, although inevitably lacking the
chilling intensity of McDermid’s previous Tony Hill/Carol Jordan series, which became ITV’s
Wire in the Blood. What’s impressive is how deftly she uses her protagonists’ working and off-
duty lives as a means to portray Scotland — its politics, sexual and family mores, gender war
and popular culture — on the eve of the devolution referendum and the Thatcher era.
The Devil’s Advocate by Steve Cavangh Orion £12.99
In

The Devil’s Advocate
Steve Cavanagh sends his lawyer hero Eddie Flynn to Alabama, where he replaces a missing
(presumed dead) attorney in defending Andy, a black bar worker falsely accused of murder. The
odds are heavily against the New Yorker since Randal, the county’s monstrous DA, loves
executing people, has never lost a case, and has sheriffs, judges and witnesses in his pocket. Was
it wise for Cavanagh to take on John Grisham on his own Deep South turf? Probably not, as the
contrast between the British author’s crude southern stereotypes and Grisham’s more nuanced
characterisation is embarrassing. Yet Cavanagh’s legal plotting is as strong and fiendishly
detailed as ever, giving his novel a peculiar split personality: baroque complexity in the
courtroom, a cartoon Dixieland away from it.
For Your Own Good by Samantha Downing Michael Joseph £12.99
Set in an American prep school, Samantha Downing’s

For Your Own Good
traces the Richard III-style rise to power of Teddy, a scheming, sociopathic teacher with an
almighty chip on his shoulder. His poisoning (via her coffee pods) of a stuck-up colleague and
rival initiates a crisis at Belmont Academy exacerbated by the similar demise of a parent, the
arrest of her daughter, and an attack on a new teacher who was covertly investigating Teddy’s
role in these incidents. This is a well-orchestrated but only so-so black comedy, resembling an
Agatha Christie without the whodunnit puzzle, or a Megan Abbott high school novel without the
Abbott magic.

Related Images

Called to the barre: toes are trampled on in The Turnout
DANIELA ALFIERI

Publisher: News UK & Ireland Ltd
Published Date: 08 Aug 2021 00:01:00
Article Id: 75168842 Version: 1
Word Count: 626
Character Count: 3078

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