In brief: Constable: A Portrait; Wivenhoe; The Enemy Within – reviews
A revisionist biography of the English landscape painter; a murder mystery in Essex; and an inventive counterfactual detective story
The best recent crime and thrillers – review roundup
Run Rose Run by Dolly Parton and James Patterson; Reputation by Sarah Vaughan; Lady Joker by Kaoru Takamura; Mouth to Mouth by Antoine Wilson; Hot Water by Christopher Fowler
Top 10 novels about toxic friendships
Complex attachments mixing intimacy and deception can decide whole lives, and have inspired novelists from William Thackeray to Elena Ferrante
Deep Water review – erotic thriller loves Ben Affleck’s slack-jawed look
Hollow-faced Affleck becomes murderously obsessed with wife Ana de Armas’s infidelities in baffling return from Fatal Attraction’s Adrian Lyne
Olivia Laing: ‘I’m sorry, but Jane Eyre is a horrendous little hysteric’
The British writer on discovering Barthes, channelling Burroughs and appreciating the talents of Patricia Highsmith’s Mr Ripley
The best recent thrillers – review roundup
Danya Kukafka upends the power dynamic of male serial killer and female victim in a thrilling second novel
The Twyford Code by Janice Hallett review – a mind-bending, heartwarming mystery
The author of bestseller The Appeal returns with a complex thriller that includes brilliant pastiches of Enid Blyton
The best recent crime and thrillers – review roundup
The Twyford Code by Janice Hallett; The Second Cut by Louise Welsh; The Maid by Nita Prose; Wahala by Nikki May and Real Easy by Marie Rutkoski
From Bill Clinton to Robert Peston: celebrity crime fiction on trial
After you’ve written your memoir, publishers these days want anyone famous to write crime novels. We put 10 of the most well-known in the dock
Top 10 cosy crime novels
From Agatha Christie to Richard Osman, these books are not without seriousness but they are all set in warm and human worlds we might prefer to our own
The best books of 2021, chosen by our guest authors
From piercing studies of colonialism to powerful domestic sagas and all points in between, our panel of writers share their favourite titles of 2021
The Way it is Now by Garry Disher review – provocative whodunnit interrogates small-town misogyny
Disher’s story of a burnt-out cop investigating his mother’s disappearance asks complex questions of its male characters
Five of the best crime and thrillers of 2021
Final novels from John le Carré and Andrea Camilleri, dark psychological debut Girl A and more
The best recent thrillers – review roundup
A post-Covid murder mystery, a puzzle in the mountains of India and a fictional take on the spy cops scandal are among this month’s crop
Cain’s Jawbone: how crime novel’s puzzling plot still keeps us guessing
In 87 years, only four readers have solved the fiendish murder mystery devised by former Observer crossword setter Edward Powys Mathers