Crime fiction: Dark tales, with the worst people, for respite from that Christmas cheer

There is no honour among thieves – and not much among the police – in Sharon Bolton’s The Mortician (Orion, £22), which contains more than a few surprises in its tattoo-clued plot.

Nobody has clean hands here, including (it will turn out) Ella Foxton, the unassuming proprietor of a small Lancashire funeral parlour. When not caring for bodies in her charge, Ella dotes on her brother Olly and nurtures a growing Instagram following with her thoughtful posts about trends such as Swedish death cleaning. Her quiet livelihood is upended when local crime boss Jonny Massey insists she arrange his murdered brother Jimmy’s funeral. This draws Ella into an old gangland feud, replete with a game of musical corpses.

That plot runs parallel to a decades-old double murder that retired detective Brian Rushton has never forgotten. After offering readers an early connection between Rushton’s old case and Ella’s current situation, Bolton gradually establishes the role of the Deathwatch, a northwest gang whose long history and surprising reach only become clear in the well-timed conclusion.

Belatedly realising she’s long been an unwilling “acolyte of the Deathwatch”, Ella discovers she’s trapped between them, Rushton and the rival Hebblethwaite gang. Bolton tempers the violence with a generous amount of gallows humour, knocking characters on both sides of the law down a few pegs at perfectly opportune moments before delivering some just deserts.

Ian Rankin’s The Heights (Orion, £25), his first stand-alone in two decades, takes its name from a London high-rise that embodies the ambitions, facades and money-laundering dodges of the city’s property market. The building’s glass and steel provide a false sense of security for residents who are so concerned with what lies outside they forget to guard against each other.

Police detectives Gillian Gish and Jack Milton are called to The Heights when overnight doorman Dwayne is found murdered. The case slides into a game of Six Degrees of Gentrification as Gish and Milton quickly become acquainted with the building’s famous residents and the fans, protesters and reporters orbiting outside. With so many suspects, red herrings rule the investigation. Gish and Milton eventually find answers, but not in their painstakingly gathered evidence. Instead, in a neat twist, they crack the case only when they realise what’s been missing from the crime scene all along.

One of the genre’s greats, Rankin draws the criminals and police well, but this story’s real strength is its attention to working-class Londoners. Continuing crime fiction’s grand tradition of exploring corruption and exploitation, The Heights is angry when it needs to be, derisive when deserved, and deft enough to leaven things with understated gags (like the developer who can’t stop reminding people that the building contains suites, thank you very much, not flats).

Christmas mysteries cluster in the genre’s cosier lanes, where justice is served as reliably as spotted dick at the feast. Fortunately, darker tales from Claire McGowan and Chris Frost offer welcome respite from all that cheer.

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The wide-ranging McGowan delivers an acidic mystery with Her Last Christmas (Thomas & Mercer, £9.99), stocked (like The Heights) with some of the very worst people. Narrator Emma is the newcomer in a group of old friends meeting at a Swiss mountaintop mansion for a debauched skiing holiday. After a blizzard cuts them off, they wake up on Christmas morning to find one guest murdered in the hot tub. Will Emma escape alive, or take the fall? Her Last Christmas will suit anyone inclined to storm the mountain with pitchforks and torches.

Not for nothing does Frost’s protagonist, Det Insp Tom Stonem, hate the holiday: “Two Christmasses in a row he had chased vicious killers; surely, he was due a quiet one.” In The Christmas Carol Killer (HarperNorth, £9.99), Tom and his partner, Det Sgt Lauren Rea, have no such luck, getting a murder case just days before Christmas. Even darker than the escalating violence is the bleak backstory of boarding-school abuse they uncover while hunting their suspects. Under the holiday flourishes, this lean procedural doesn’t waste any time delivering its gifts.

Set around Christmas Eve, Peter Swanson’s Do You See What I See? (Faber, £10) is narrated by Nicholas Child, a novelist whose career has stalled. A lifeline comes from Marco, a far more successful writer who can’t get his own follow-up off the ground and hires Nicholas to help.

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Nicholas travels to Cape Cod, where Marco and his wife Maeve have a full house of guests for Christmas. That first evening, it’s clear every guest resents Marco, for shaming them, stealing from them or outshining them. When Marco is found murdered the next morning, his throat slit, Nicholas realises Maeve had “just hosted a party full of people who had reason to kill her husband”.

The bare set-up – country house, murder, multiple suspects – may be familiar, but Swanson’s lean style delivers well-drawn characters riven with acidic jealousies (petty and otherwise). The layered narrative doubles back from Nicholas’s first account to a slipperier version, before a third account twists again.

Amid those turns, Swanson folds in dark, slow-burn surprises. Just when the conclusion seems tidy, Nicholas discovers he’s not quite as in control as he’d thought. The result is a Christmas mystery that sneaks its way into doing something affectingly surprising with the deep nature of that holiday.

New York’s famed Mysterious Bookshop regularly commissions contemporary Christmas stories. Store owner Otto Penzler has gathered 12 of those in Christmas Crimes at the Mysterious Bookshop (Bantam, £12.99). Don’t let the needlepoint cover fool you: this collection leans more into noir than into cosiness.

After Jason Starr opens with the unnervingly bleak Black Christmas, for example, Loren D Estleman’s Wolfe Trap presents a character so suspicious he’d demand “a paternity test in the manger in Bethlehem”. There’s light here too, though, in Lyndsay Faye’s A Midnight Clear, which captures the holiday’s acute loneliness through damaged characters who try to hurt each other a little less than they might otherwise have done. Other entries are even playful, such as Tom Mead’s Hester’s Gift, which nods to Patricia Highsmith.

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Inevitably, commitment to the Christmas theme varies, but Thomas Perry and David Gordon really anchor their plots in the holiday. Perry’s charmingly structured Here We Come A-Wassailing follows a gift circulating across New York City on Christmas Eve, crossing through the city’s varied worlds as it goes. Possibly the New York-iest story in this very New York collection, Gordon’s Sergeant Santa understood the assignment, neatly balancing the genre’s pessimism with some deft heartstring tugs and a witty path towards street justice.

The standout is Laura Lippman’s Snowflake Time, a glittering case study of a terrible narrator whose self-awareness struggles to reach beyond his own self-pity. As she did in last year’s Murder Takes a Vacation, Lippman hits her targets hard, but with such grace they’re dead before they know it. Here, she puts real bite into cat ladies, at the expense of the men who dismiss them. As fiercely witty and precise as her very best work, this is gleeful stuff.

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Holiday anthologies are a risky business (Tod Goldberg’s Hanukkah-themed Eight Very Bad Nights was one recent exception). With all this range, though, Penzler’s collection offers something for even the most holiday-weary reader.