Crime

A famous novelist orders his wife's dinner without asking. The first wife tells him never to do that again. The second wife thanks him for being thoughtful. Constantine builds an entire novel out of the gap between those two women, and the gap is where the danger lives.

Four people narrate this novel and every one of them is labelled: The Help, The Wife, The Star, The Friend. There is no chapter marked The Detective. Miss Marple is watched for four hundred pages and never once given the microphone, and that decision turns an authorised Christie continuation into something genuinely strange.

One sister has built a career on catching liars. The other lies the way most people clear their throats. Nina Simon strands them both on the Colorado River with a corpse, a wellness startup and no way out, and the result is the most entertaining locked-canyon mystery of the year.

Every bank in New York turns down Ray Carney's wife for a loan, so the furniture man goes back to fencing. The last Harlem Trilogy novel runs from 1981 to 1986 and asks one question over and over: what do you value enough to steal for?

A furniture dealer four years out of the crooked life needs Jackson 5 tickets for his daughter, and the only man who can get them is a corrupt detective with a subpoena and nothing left to lose. Whitehead's 1970s Harlem novel is angrier and funnier than the first.