The best recent crime and thrillers – review roundup

Murder at the Grand Alpine Hotel by Lucy Foley; The Silent Appeal by Janice Hallett; Cold Sunset by William Boyd; The Occidental Book of the Dead by T Geronimo Johnson and The Last Tenant by Eva Björg ÆgisdóttirMurder at the Grand Alpine Hotel by Lucy Foley (HarperCollins, £22) This, the first Miss Marple continuation novel, must have been a more difficult undertaking than a new Hercule Poirot; furnished by Christie with a cartoonist’s worth of exaggerated traits, the Belgian detective is surely easier to bring off the page than the unassuming but observant elderly spinster. Foley makes a commendable attempt, removing Miss Marple from the postwar austerity of St Mary Mead to the comparative luxury of the Swiss Alps. Although we are introduced to the unnamed body in the gondola cabin at the start, an immediate backward shift for a two-day lead-up means Miss Marple has little actual detecting to do until about halfway through the proceedings. Employing four narrators rather dilutes things, as well as necessitating a considerable amount of Murder of Roger Ackroyd-style withholding of information, but Foley’s Miss M shows her true colours when – of course – the hotel gets cut off from…

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