Bundled Bourdain thrillers a delight

Most people know the late Anthony Bourdain as a chef, culinary author/memoir writer and TV personality. But did you know he also wrote mystery fiction?

Between 1995 and 2002 Bourdain published three mystery novels: Bone in the Throat, Gone Bamboo and The Bobby Gold Stories. They’re collected here as Three Crime Novels by Anthony Bourdain (Bloomsbury, 608 pages, $32) and they are, well, delightful.

You know you’re in good hands when an author describes a character as “a cross between Sonny Bono and Hermann Göring” — this is a guy who knows how to turn a phrase.

And this is a guy who knows how to spin a yarn: these stories, starring an ex-con, a retired government assassin and (yes) a chef, are pure gold — not merely mostly forgotten curiosities written by a guy who’s famous for something else entirely, but exciting, entertaining mysteries that demand to be read simply because they’re so damned good.

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Jill and Ted used to be a happy couple. Now: not so much. Money is causing some strain between them; Ted, in particular, is shouldering a lot of stress. Their solution: murder Ted’s wealthy brother, Greg.

This isn’t a spoiler, by the way: Shari Lapena’s Getting Away With Murder (Doubleday Canada, 352 pages, $27) opens with the killing, gets it right up front, and then jumps back in time a couple of months to show us how Jill and Ted got to that point. And then, brilliantly, it takes us through the time after the murder, when things get really complicated.

If Alfred Hitchcock were still alive and making movies, this is exactly the kind of story he’d do: a small, character-driven thriller that ratchets up the suspense to nearly unbearable levels. Lapena has a lot of fans, and oh boy are they going to love this story of guilt and paranoia and desperation.

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In 2018, Danish screenwriter Søren Sveistrup published his first novel, the dark serial-killer thriller The Chestnut Man. Its two central characters, Naia Thulin and Mark Hess, return in an absolutely riveting sequel, Hide and Seek (Harper, 560 pages, $27).

A woman has disappeared; echoes from the past lead Thulin and Hess to revisit a 30-year-old case. But can old secrets provide a solution to a modern-day mystery?

This is Nordic crime at its finest: a twisted story full of shadows, a pair of complex lead characters, a villain who oozes evil from every pore. Beautifully translated by Ian Giles, who also did The Chestnut Man, the book is guaranteed to be a hit with dark-thriller fans.

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The thing about Robert Harris is that no matter what genre he writes in (historical novel, science fiction, contemporary thriller) and no matter what period he writes about (past, present or future), you’re guaranteed one thing: you’re going to love the book.

In Agrippa (Random House Canada, 384 pages, $29), his latest novel, Harris returns to ancient Rome — the setting of 2003’s Pompeii and his Cicero trilogy (2006-15) — to tell a story of ambition, power and betrayal.

Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa (63-12 BCE) was a military genius, the son-in-law of the founder of the Roman Empire, Augustus, a man of common roots who became a hero of Rome at great personal cost. But Harris isn’t writing a history text; in his supremely talented hands, this is about as thrilling a novel as you can imagine, a vividly told life story that transports us back in time more than two millennia and makes us feel as though we have actually walked the streets of ancient Rome.

It’s another stunning achievement by a magnificent storyteller.

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Halifax freelancer David Pitt’s column appears the first weekend of every month. You can follow him on Bluesky at @bookman.bsky.social.