Fiction

The Third Estate: Devil's Tango by Debbie Berlin is a razor-sharp espionage thriller of assassins, ciphers, and lethal secrets

She is twenty-two years old and both her hands are black to the fingertips. In her country, sin does not stay private — it surfaces in the veins as a rot that climbs, then maddens, then kills. She has been killing for the Prophet for three years, and her skin has kept the receipts.

A dying serial killer agrees to be interviewed for a streaming docuseries and says, on camera, that he murdered four women in the summer of 2001. Not five. Four. In a small Washington town, two women who have not spoken in twenty-five years understand immediately what that means.

A concussed scholar falls on a wrapped sword, drags the blade free by accident, and a beautiful silver-eyed man appears and kills three bandits. The scholar's first question is whether he is addressing a seraph or an archangel. The man's first plan is to sit down by the road and wait for him to freeze.

Ten years after the trivia night, a severed finger arrives at Pirriwee High in the morning post, and the Year 10 parents discover they have no idea what their children have been doing. Moriarty's sequel is very funny, genuinely angry, and at its best when the teenagers are talking.