MAYER WAKEFIELD applauds Rosamund Pike’s punchy and tragic portrayal of a multi-tasking mother and high court judge
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Crime fiction
Reviews of Good Neighbours by Sarah Langan, The Basel Killings by Hansjorg Schneider, The Final Girl Support Group by Grady Hendrix and The Crooked Shore by Martin Edwards
FIONA O CONNOR recommends an unflinching depiction of child sexual abuse and its aftershocks, set in a working-class Liverpool family
New releases from Paul Weller, Wet Leg, and Dino Saluzzi
PAUL DONOVAN relishes the spectacle of a 1950s detective in pursuit of a 500-year-old murder mystery
MARIA DUARTE recommends the intricate study of a high-performance and highly dysfuntional German family
GUILLERMO THOMAS is intrigued by a history of the Middle East that demonstrates how promising post colonial beginnings were snuffed out by Western imperialist interests
SUBURBS in US fiction are often sinister places, but few more so than that at the centre of Sarah Langan’s Good Neighbours (Titan, £8.99).
Maple Street is an aspirational satellite of Long Island, and the Wilde family don’t fit in there and know it. Their accents strike their new neighbours as plebeian, their habits unsettling and their children undisciplined.
But that might not be enough on its own to cause a season of spiralling mayhem if it wasn’t for the sinkhole that opens up in the neighbourhood one dry summer.
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