The best recent thrillers – review roundup

There’s no mystery about who committed the murder in Michelle Paver’s Wakenhyrst (Head of Zeus). We know from the start that in 1913 historian Edmund Stearne used an ice pick and a geological hammer to “slaughter… the first person he came across in the most bizarre and horrible way”. The mystery, in this original and engrossing novel, is why he did it. Stearne spends the rest of his life in an asylum, creating three Hieronymus Bosch-esque paintings full of “tiny malevolent faces”. “Painted in such obsessive detail they could be alive”, they take the world by storm after his death; 50-odd years after the murder, journalists and academics are digging into Stearne’s story.

And what a story it is. Paver masterfully blends together two narratives – that of Stearne’s daughter, Maud, a lonely child raised in the Suffolk fens, and entries from Stearne’s diary, which Maud discovers, in which he details finding a medieval painting in a churchyard, before descending into madness.

Paver is known for her bestselling Chronicles of Ancient Darkness children’s series, but she is also the author of gloriously chilling novels for adults: her Arctic winter-set ghost story Dark Matter is a work of wonder. Wakenhyrst is equally brilliant, spanning fen devils, mystics and the lot of women in Edwardian England as Paver carefully circles the question of Stearne’s madness: are the devils he sees real or imagined?

Her fen, “alive with vast skeins of geese… the last stretch of the ancient marshes that once drowned the whole of East Anglia”, casts “a dim green subaqueous glimmer” over her story; Maud, poised between superstition and religion, is inexorably drawn to it. “‘Don’t you nivver go near un,’” she’s told by her hated nurse. “‘If’n you do, the ferishes and hobby-lanterns ull hook you in to a miry death.” Like all good heroines, Maud doesn’t listen.

Erin Kelly’s Stone Mothers (Hodder & Stoughton) – a very different tale of Suffolk and madness – opens as Marianne is thrown into a state of shock by her husband’s surprise purchase of a flat in the revamped Nazareth hospital, formerly the East Anglia Pauper Lunatic Asylum. It’s in Nusstead, Marianne’s home town; her husband wants her to be able to spend time with her dying mother. Marianne’s reaction is extreme and disturbing. “Please, Sam, don’t make me go back,” she panics.

Marianne has a dark history and a secret that she and her ex-boyfriend, Jesse, have kept for years. Now the pact they made is beginning to break, threatening her family and vulnerable daughter.

Twisting back through time, Stone Mothers is the story of how a covered-up murder will never lie quietly and a terrifying indictment of how the mentally ill were once treated. “The Victorians used to call their mental hospitals stone mothers… They had such faith in architecture back then that they thought the design of the building could literally nurse the sick back to health,” says Marianne, now a respected academic. Kelly goes on to show just how wrong this was, providing a genuinely surprising twist that turns assumptions neatly on their heads.

The Better Sister (Faber) is another classy slice of psychological drama from Alafair Burke. Chloe Taylor, a prize-winning publisher, is married to her estranged sister Nicky’s former husband, Adam, and has brought up their son, Ethan. When Adam is murdered in the family’s home, Ethan falls under suspicion – “Whatever test she had in mind for how a kid should act when he hears his father’s been murdered, Ethan had failed it, and now the police were going to put our family under a microscope” – and the troubled Nicky comes back into her life.