Western North Carolina is known for its waterfalls, mountain views, and inns strategically located to capture tourism. Megan Miranda has set her clever new crime novel, The Last to Vanish, in one such inn and in the adjacent town of Cutter’s Pass. The Passage, as the inn is called because it is a starting point for the Appalachian Trail, attracts not only adventurers but also professionals and amateurs. In the last quarter century, six visitors – a quartet of friends known as The Fraternity Four and two singletons – have disappeared. The youngest graduate, giving the book its title, was an investigative journalist. The novel begins with a guest checking in, who provides an alias but is soon identified by hotel manager Abby Lovett as the journalist’s brother, ready to detect something. Abby tells the story in an unorthodox way, treating the disappearances in reverse chronological order. The structure works well because Cutter’s Pass is full of secrets – “This town [is] a vault,” muses Abby – which Miranda skillfully brings to light. The Last to Vanish is a fine example of how important timing can be in a thriller. (Marysue Rucci Books/Scribner, July 26)
Allie Reynolds’ The Swell takes place in a very different vacation spot: a coveted surfing beach in an Australian national park. Sorrow Bay is the name of the beach, and one of its saddest features is the two corrupt wardens who, for a monthly bribe, cede the unparalleled waves to a small group of fanatics. The story is mainly told by a sports therapist named Kenna, originally from Cornwall, where she grew up surfing with her best friend Mikki, who is now a member of the group that monopolizes Sorrow. The Swell begins with Kenna arriving in Sorrow to pay a surprise visit to Mikki. Initially eyed with suspicion, Kenna makes herself useful by tending her new companions, who are taking a terrifying physical toll on the waves of Sorrow. Away from the water, Mikki spends time with handsome Jack – a relationship that gives Kenna foreboding: Mikki comes from money, which may be her main attraction to the perpetually broke Jack. The book’s ever-present menace can be deafening, but the payoffs eventually come. By the end of The Swell, several characters have died violent deaths, and the reader has reason to believe more carnage is yet to come. (Putnam, July 19)
“My childhood friends were Agatha Christie and Stephen King,” says the eponymous narrator of “Daisy Darker.” The remark highlights the challenge Daisy’s creator Alice Feeney set herself: Follow the classic recipe for Christie’s “And Then There Were None” — isolated cast of characters who are blown away one by one until there’s none left — and revitalize the dish. Feeney begins her mystery at a family reunion where Daisy and six other Darkers and an honorary member of the clan gather at Seaglass, their crumbling home on a private island off the coast of Cornwall. The occasion is the 80th birthday of matriarch Nana, which coincidentally falls on Halloween. As the night progresses, the revelers are knocked off one by one, a particularly disturbing trend because, as Daisy explained at the outset, “When the tide comes in, we’ll be cut off from the rest of the world for eight hours.” Daisy’s narration jumps between past and present back and forth as an already awful night is made worse by a thunderstorm, and I forgot to mention Nana collects clocks, with 80 of them ticking menacingly in the background. Feeney spices up her plot with humor—like in a flashback with Conor, the extra family member who, as a teenager, attended a birthday party in Seaglass with his “not bad impression of Tom Cruise in top gun. He wore aviator goggles indoors, even in the dark, and kept crashing into things and people…” However, the most striking feature of “Daisy Darker” isn’t its group dynamics or dark comedy or boldness. A surprise in the final chapters may leave some readers feeling betrayed. To say that Feeney breaks the rules of mystery writing would be an understatement. My own take on unorthodoxy is this: “You’ll get away with it this time, Alice Feeney, but I wouldn’t try again.” (Flatiron, August 30)
Dennis Drabelle is a former crime editor at Book World.