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This month’s thrillers are full of women grappling with misdeeds — in some cases their own, but mostly those of men.
We start in Dublin, where Lou Manson, a college professor, is trying as hard as she can to forget the awful thing that happened more than 30 years ago. But when a figure from the past suddenly emerges, it all comes flooding back. “It only takes a second for the terror and guilt to find me,” she says.
Fiona McPhillips’s tense and unsettling WHEN WE WERE SILENT (Flatiron, 307 pp., $28.99), is about sexual predators and the wall of silence that often protects them, particularly in a place in thrall to the all-powerful Catholic Church. It’s also about how hard it can be for victims to find peace.
Alternating between the present and the past, when Lou was 18 years old and a wrong-side-of-the-tracks scholarship student at Highfield Manor, a snooty all-girls school in Dublin, the story presents a compelling portrait of a society animated more by what is concealed than what is disclosed. Back then, Lou’s efforts to expose the sexual abuses of the school’s P.E. teacher — while dealing with her alcoholic mother and her illicit passion for a girl in her class, Shauna — ended in tragedy.
Years later, a new allegation at Highfield, against a different teacher, stirs up painful memories. It also sends Lou on a hunt for her long-lost friend, whose life took its own sharp turn decades earlier and who has since mysteriously dropped out of sight. “Only Shauna ever knew the truth about that night,” Lou says. The book doesn’t come to a boil until the end, but the reality is even more shocking than we imagined.
Manako Kajii — or Kajimana, as the papers call her — is in a Tokyo prison, having been convicted of killing three of her lovers after cooking them fabulous meals, but all anyone wants to talk about is her weight. “I bet Kajimana eats an absolute ton!” declares one of the clueless men in Asako Yuzuki’s BUTTER (Ecco, 452 pp., $30). “It’s a miracle that someone that fat could con so many people into wanting to marry her!”
A best seller in Japan and now deftly translated into English by Polly Barton, “Butter” is based on the real case of the so-called Konkatsu Killer, who was convicted of killing three would-be husbands and is currently on death row in Japan. Yuzuki has turned it into not just a fascinating psychological puzzle but also a damning indictment of Japanese misogyny and fatphobia. It has the side effect of making the reader very hungry.
Sent to talk to Kajii in prison, Rika Machida — a female journalist at a male-dominated magazine — is repelled and fascinated by her bossiness and lack of remorse. Kajii orders Rika to eat some delicious food, starting with rice with butter and soy sauce, and describe it to her as a condition of a proper interview.
“Superior-quality butter should be eaten when it’s still cold and hard, to truly luxuriate in its texture and aroma,” Kajii says. “It will begin to melt almost immediately with the heat of the rice, but I want you to eat it before it melts fully. Cool butter and warm rice.”
Rika’s investigation is unexpected and exciting, and allows her to enjoy food — and to gain weight without guilt — for the first time.
“She put a hand to her stomach, and tried to listen calmly to her own desires, to what her body wanted,” Yuzuki writes. And then she eats.
For a novel with such a high body count, L.M. Chilton’s SWIPED (Scout Press, 294 pp., $27.99) is remarkably lighthearted. It begins in the hellscape of a “hen party,” as bachelorette parties are known in Britain, where the participants are drunkenly playing X-rated party games and the maid of honor, Gwen Turner, is hiding in the bathroom, trawling for dates on her phone.
“As you can see from the excellent selection of photos, he really enjoys laughing in various pubs with two to three different mates,” she remarks of one of the men who pop up.
By the low standards of the dating app world, he seems promising. But then he sends her an unsettling piece of news: A man she went on one bad date with recently is dead, and it looks like murder.
He’s just the first. The men from her last bunch of matches on the app — including Rob, “the handsy guy who wasn’t over his ex”; Freddie, who recounted in great detail the plot of a TV show that Gwen had already seen; and Josh, who accused her of being hormonal and declared, “No wonder you’re single!” — are all dead, too.
The book riffs amusingly not just on life as a singleton but also on cryptocurrency, algorithms, the pluses and minuses of female friendship and pre-wedding angst. The mystery in this “Bridget Jones”-lite novel is almost secondary. But it’s also urgent, because it becomes clear that Gwen is being framed for the murders, and she has to unveil the killer before it’s too late.
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