Living in a nightmare and murder most foul

OH, the undiluted joy of reading! If I can help it, I'll never retire, because I have the greatest job on earth. Couriers regularly deliver packages of books to my gate, free of charge. All I have to do is read. And write. I'm going to cover four novels today because I have to stay ahead – three noirs and a lyrical Irish debut that is itself as dark as night.

This is my kind of noir. Not littered with murder scenes, detectives and forensic evidence. In a sleepy Vermont town, a girl is murdered. Only one. A farmer finds her in his fields, naked and disfigured. Now the reader gets to know her family and friends. Everyone is devastated, but it's clear she was murdered by someone close to her, someone with a personal agenda.

I was right about the killer, but I'm familiar with unreliable narrators and I know what to look out for, and besides, I'm often wrong too. It's the domesticity I love, the simplicity, the sharply drawn characters. There is a slight supernatural element, which also appeals to me. A book that carries you through a winter night and makes you think about the random fragility and ephemerality of life.

Lapena is an author whose books sell in the multi-millions. She knows her story.

What Have You Done? by Shari Lapena was published by Penguin Random House and costs R380 at Graffiti.

Here's a delicious cosy mystery that turns quite inhospitable. It's 1950 in Washington, DC. A bunch of young women board with the stingy, grim Mrs Nilsson, her alert, helpful and awkward teenage son, and little daughter devoid of beauty or cuteness.

The group forms a tightknit unit after Grace March moves into the tiny attic room. Grace is a delightful character: beautiful, smart, sensitive, funny and brimming with life. She is a good listener and gets involved in the other women's complicated lives. There's an English beauty whose husband is a physician at the front, a cop's daughter, a frustrated baseball player with an injury and a rigid pro-McCarthy typist.

They start eating together one night a week. Recipes are even provided, as in the Tannie Maria novels. Then someone is killed in the house.

The house is also a character, asleep for years out of sheer boredom but now awakened and perceiving the sounds, scents and emotions of its inhabitants.

Who is the enemy in their midst? Is it one of Grace's lovers or a resident? Against the backdrop of a time of hysteria in America, when people relentlessly hunted Communists and reported family and friends, the drama unfolds at Briarwood House.

One reads for the characters and the mystery. Kate Quinn is the best-selling author of The Rose Code.

The Briar Club by Kate Quinn was published by HarperCollins and costs R356 at Graffiti.

How smart to set a thriller against the backdrop of a reality show similar to Survivor. Lyla is a scientist with a doctorate who doesn't manage to secure a permanent appointment. Plus, she has to provide, because her handsome, slightly younger boyfriend, Nico, is an actor who gets a gig only now and then. He believes everything will change if he takes part in a TV game show. The problem is that the contestants have to be couples.

Lyla's contract expires and she agrees to participate in the programme with him. She considers herself a six compared to his nine, but the producers want to focus on real people with whom viewers can identify. Moreover, they would like relationships to be vividly destroyed on camera, with drama and bitterness. Watchable.

Lyla is not sure if she sees a future with Nico. The couples set off for an Indonesian island, a glorious contrast to cold, grey London. Lyla is determined to drop out first, leaving Nico behind to establish another partnership. It doesn't work out that way.

It's refreshing to see how chaotic it is behind the scenes of a reality show, how everything is put together with Sellotape and staple guns. This show is clearly an experiment; one person funded it and hoped to sell it to a TV channel afterwards. So, he took a lot of shortcuts. And everything goes dramatically wrong. There is a tropical storm on the way and nerves are frayed.

It is always fascinating to read how people unravel and their true nature emerges in extreme circumstances. The primal drive for survival dominates everything and the veneer of civilisation dissolves. It's a contemporary, mature Lord of the Flies.

One Perfect Couple by Ruth Ware was published by Simon & Schuster and costs R633 at Exclusive Books.

It feels as if I've already read this book – it seems familiar. It's almost a subgenre: the existential angst of lost Irish teenagers in Dublin who drink too much, pop pills and have meaningless sex. It's poetic as well as funny. The narrator in this book, Charlotte, is a teenager and a virgin at the beginning of the book. The latter state does not last long.

She tells of her love life, of the astonishing weight of the first penis she held in her hand. The appeal of dangerous men, of arrogant thugs, gangsters and platonic pals. She dates Johnny but secretly sleeps with his gangster brother, whose girlfriend is pregnant. They were, in her words, toxic before that was in vogue.

She consistently addresses an anonymous lover, You.

I want you to feel the emptiness, the loneliness, the desperation. I want these stories to sink their teeth into you, pull you apart, pull your flesh asunder, open you up and leave you bloody and exposed to the elements. I want you to hear the sadness, the mourning, the grief. I want you to see the bodies pile up. I want you to question it all. I want you to drop to your knees and cry out and beg me to stop but I want you to keep listening. I want you to hear it all because you have to, you need to.

The reader is held hostage, too. It's dark, nihilistic and hypnotic. Under the emptiness and life-weariness, a warm heart beats and the narrator is not as fragile as she appears. Finally, all the men are just bodies, as the title suggests. She is a strong woman with a dark streak. Expect a twist in the tail.

Bodies by Christine Anne Foley was published by John Murray and costs R405 at Graffiti.

What are we listening to?

Bob Dylan sings Murder Most Foul:

♦ VWB ♦

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