Smiley yellow, bruise blue and pitch black

IN between sports broadcasts and social activities, I read two domestic noirs — my guilty pleasure. Both had blue and yellow covers, the colours that typify the genre. The titles in yellow, the authors' names in white, with quite a bit of black added to the blue, as one would expect.

I'll start with the most enjoyable, the local one: A Short Life by Nicky Greenwall. It's my kind of book from start to finish. It's pleasant to recognise landmarks in and around beautiful Cape Town, and the characters feel like people who could be friends of my friends. The structure is interesting and keeps you turning pages, with shortish chapters, each from a different character's perspective.

It begins with an accident: after friends spent a Friday night together, a car lies on its back like a beetle. Apparently, no other vehicle was involved.

Adam, the driver, hadn't drunk that much. Moreover, he has no memory of the accident and what preceded it. As good friends do, his pal Nick and Nick's wife Franky remove him from the scene: he was surely over the limit.

Thus, secrets start piling up like thunderclouds. That same night, another member of their circle of friends, Charley, is involved in a fatal accident. She crashed into a tree. No one knows where she was going or why she left her sleeping husband and children in the night to drive somewhere.

We get to know each of the friends better in turn, also through glimpses into their past. Franky and Charley have been friends since preschool. Charley and Seb have been a couple since university. Adam and Nick have also been as thick as thieves for a long time. Nick is the one who always solves everyone's problems. Adam is clumsy with low self-esteem, slightly overweight and cute with curly hair, big glasses and nice teeth. Then there's Nick's wife, Maria, from Barcelona: an ex-model with a shaky grasp of English, maybe also of the truth?

The police aren't particularly interested but Seb hires a private detective to investigate Charley's accident. Things that come to light threaten the equilibrium and dynamics of friendships. Old skeletons threaten to tumble out of the closet.

Typical of domestic noir, the reader doesn't know who to trust. People's motives are obscure. Everyone lies and makes morally questionable decisions on the spur of the moment, under high pressure. Things they have to live with and whose consequences ripple outward.

It's a psychological thriller that reminds me of the books of one of my favourite authors, Iris Murdoch. The reader shares in the shifting dynamics, motivations and inner dialogue of a group of diverse people. It's a changing landscape. Loyalties shift. Who can be trusted? The reader invests emotionally in the characters; they are flawed, human, imperfect, anxious and confused. They are eccentric and driven: after Franky's father dies, her mother grieves in her own way, proactively. When a thief snatches Franky's handbag, her mother chases after him and with the help of bystanders, he's caught. Her mother takes the handbag back.

Things come to a head and characters are tested. It's sophisticated, clever and funny like Barbara Trapido's books, with privileged characters wrestling with first-world and third-world problems; smart, ambitious and at times drifting characters who are sometimes overwhelmed by their seemingly ideal existence and the challenges of young parenthood. It can hold its own against the best international offerings in the genre.

Last weekend I had places to go, people to see and things to do, when all I really wanted to do was finish this book. This is the way a book should capture you.

A Short Life by Nicky Greenwall was published by Penguin and costs R310 at Exclusive Books.

Slaughter: what an ideal name for a writer whose books always feature bloody murders. Here we have a locked room murder. It is committed under circumstances where it was seemingly impossible for the perpetrator to enter, commit the crime and escape undetected. It involves a situation where an intruder couldn't get out; for example, the original locked room: a murder victim is found in a windowless room that was locked from the inside.

There's a small group of people at a resort in the forest, McAlpine Lodge. They reached the remote reserve on foot and there's no internet or cellphone service. Mercy, the daughter of the owners, is murdered and there are only a handful of suspects. Two of the guests have lied about their professions: they are in fact a detective and a doctor in the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, Will and Sara Linton. They're there on honeymoon, then everything goes wrong.

The suspects are the guests, of whom at least one is using an alias, and the family that owns the reserve: the eccentric McAlpines. Father Cecil is grumpy and short-tempered, now in a wheelchair. His wife, Bitty Ma, is tiny and girlish, with a high-pitched voice. She adores her adopted son, Dave, a problem child who arrived at the lodge and was raised as one of the McAlpines' own. When he was 20 and Mercy 15, he got her pregnant. Her parents blamed her rather than him. Her brother's will was broken years ago by his violent father. Dave is a charmer, womaniser and wife-beater. Mercy had long been divorced from him but still occasionally slept with him. Their son, Jon, was the light of her life. Which is unexpectedly snuffed out — her life, I mean. It seems as if her entire family hated and abused her.

Now Will and Sara must follow clues and solve the (almost) locked room murder. The tension is taut and the reader experiences indignation and sadness on Mercy's behalf. Disgust for her parents and ex-husband. It's a dark, brooding bundle of ancient grudges and covered-up secrets, violence and conniving. The author knows her story and her genre. It held my attention.

This is Why We Lied by Karin Slaughter was published by Harper Collins and costs R405 at Exclusive Books.

What are we listening to? Joni Mitchell sings Blue:

♦ VWB ♦

BE PART OF THE CONVERSATION: Go to the bottom of this page to share your opinion. We look forward to hearing from you.