The Deepest Fake, Daniel Kalla (Simon & Schuster, 304 pages)
Simon & Schuster/Supplied
How does Kalla do it? The B.C. emergency-room doctor has brought us astonishingly prescient plotlines about pandemics, fitness fads and influencers, all of them seemingly snatched from the front-page news. The Deepest Fake is another, about the rise and threat of AI.
Liam Hirsch is the man who has it all: the gorgeous family, the money, the career of his dreams as CEO of an AI company destined to become even more successful. And then it starts to fall apart. First, Liam is diagnosed with a terminal illness. A week later, he’s confronted with proof of his wife’s infidelity. The family implodes. Faced with The End, Liam turns to his beloved work, where he finds himself confronting AI-generated deepfakes that rival reality. Liam begins to suspect that his current reality has been created but why, and by whom? He turns to Detective Andrea DeWalt to uncover just what is real and what is AI. I didn’t put this book down until the final page.
She Didn’t See It Coming, Shari Lapena (Penguin Random House, 352 pages)
The legendary Ruth Ware has dubbed Lapena’s fiction “Suburban Paranoia.” Suspense sneaks into perfect houses in pretty towns. That’s the setting for Lapena’s ninth novel – the lovely wife disappears from her home into thin air, leaving her car, keys, computer and phone. There’s no note, no word and no clues.
That’s the setup for a deep dive into the backstory of Sam and Bryden, the perfect couple. The question isn’t just why she vanished, but also, how? She doesn’t even seem to have left the apartment building they live in. The unravelling of this very complex mystery makes this one of Lapena’s best books. And if you haven’t already discovered her tales of suburban dreams gone mad, the other eight are great too.
The Guest Children, Patrick Tarr (HarperCollins, 272 pages)
I nearly passed on this debut by Torontonian Tarr because it seemed like a reprise of Stephen King’s The Shining. But I love historical mysteries and Ontario in the 1940s has always fascinated me, so I dived in. Tarr had me hooked. His characters are deep and his atmospheric abilities brilliant.
The story starts with two children evacuated from the London Blitz, Frances and Michael Hawksby, who are sent to live in Canada with their relatives who own a rural resort. We know much of their journey because Michael leaves pages of his journal at each stop. But their fate is a mystery, for the Hawksby children are never seen again. At war’s end, they are lost.
Enter Randall Sturges, a man with demons of his own. His failure to enlist meant many thought him a coward, and in the postwar years, jobs are going to veterans, not those who stayed behind. Randall sets himself up as a private investigator and gets the task of finding out what happened to the children, a job that takes him to the wilds of Northern Ontario, into a strange place full of even stranger people. Tarr knows how to do spooky and he keeps the suspense moving until the final pages. There is a twist at the end you will not guess. Save this one for the weekend because you won’t want to stop reading.
The Locked Ward, Sarah Pekkanen (St. Martin’s, 320 pages)
Macmillan Publishers/Supplied
“I didn’t do it. You have to get me out of here.” These are the first words Amanda Ravenel hears spoken by her twin sister, Georgia Cartwright. The girls were adopted as infants by different families. Amanda’s family is middle-class and close-knit; Georgia’s fabulously wealthy family are politically and socially connected. Neither girl ever knew she had a twin. Now, Georgia is asking for help. She’s been accused of murder and is a resident in a locked psychiatric ward, her every movement watched and recorded. If she’s found sane, she’ll be tried and sent to prison. If she’s found mentally ill, she’ll stay locked up forever.
That’s the marvellous premise of this terrific novel. As Amanda digs out the clues to Georgia’s life and the crime, it’s an irresistible read. Pekkanen seems to have a talent for characters who can’t speak for themselves (House of Glass was one of my favourites) and the plotline is complex. The dynamic between twins raised far apart but who are very similar in many ways gives it greater depth.
The Sleepwalker, by Lars Kepler, translated by Alice Menzies (McClelland & Stewart, 512 pages)
Fans of Kepler know to expect the very unexpected in his excellent Joona Linna novels, and this mystery is something very new and strange. The story begins with a teenager found asleep on the floor of a caravan at a campsite outside of Stockholm. The walls and floor of the camper are coated with blood and the sleeping boy is using a severed arm as a pillow. When he wakes up, he has no idea what happened or how he came to be in that location. He has a rare sleepwalking disorder and can tell the police nothing about what happened or how he ended up at the scene.
Joona Linna is called in on the case and he soon realizes that nothing about it is going to be easy. He asks his old friend, Erik Marie Bark, to use hypnosis in an attempt to reach the boy’s buried memories. The hypnosis reveals just what Linna fears – a terrifying killer is on the loose and searching for prey. Like all Linna novels, this one is slow but it builds suspense as it goes.
What the Night Brings, Mark Billingham (Sphere, 415 pages)
Book by book, with more than a dozen books in the Tom Thorne series, Billingham has gone from strength to strength. The newest is one of his very best as Thorne investigates a betrayal that affects everyone near him.
The story begins with three dead police officers and another attack by lunchtime – all in a single day. It’s clear the murders are targeted. More strange and unsettling events indicate that the deaths – there are more to come – are payback, but to whom and for what? Thorne goes on the hunt, doing what he does best, but his trail leads to places and people he trusts. A secret threatens to explode everything Thorne believes is true. This is definitely one of Billingham’s best.
