The best recent thrillers – review roundup | The Guardian

A pitch-black outback noir; a missing teenager and her devious friends; the return of SJ Watson; and a tale of India’s first female detective The HuntedGabriel BergmoserFaber, £8.99, pp288Gabriel Bergmoser’s short, shocking debut is less thriller than black-as-pitch descent into nightmare. It opens with Frank, who runs a petrol station hours from the nearest town in a desolate patch of Australia “too grassy to be a desert, too ugly to mean anything to a tourist, too dry to be farming lands”. His granddaughter Allie is reluctantly staying with him, and the pair are together when an old car veers on to the forecourt, the driver coated head to foot in dried mud and blood. Continue reading…

A pitch-black outback noir; a missing teenager and her devious friends; the return of SJ Watson; and a tale of India’s first female detective

The Hunted
Gabriel Bergmoser
Faber, £8.99, pp288

Gabriel Bergmoser’s short, shocking debut is less thriller than black-as-pitch descent into nightmare. It opens with Frank, who runs a petrol station hours from the nearest town in a desolate patch of Australia “too grassy to be a desert, too ugly to mean anything to a tourist, too dry to be farming lands”. His granddaughter Allie is reluctantly staying with him, and the pair are together when an old car veers on to the forecourt, the driver coated head to foot in dried mud and blood.

Continue reading…