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Brighton-based Jack Jordan already had several outstanding thrillers under his belt when he released Do No Harm last year. Just out in paperback, it was loudly trumpeted as “the thriller of the summer” and has rightly cemented itself in top-ten lists everywhere, becoming his first Sunday Times bestseller. A superior novel with a moral dilemma at its heart, the plot saw a top surgeon being blackmailed and under pressure to murder a patient on her operating table.

Hot on its heels, and with enviable rapidity, comes Jordan’s follow-up, Conviction. Though this also features blackmail – this time of a barrister – and a not dissimilar ethical conundrum, any thought that it might be a retread, rushed out to cash in on Do No Harm’s success, should immediately be cast aside. The novel is at least as good, superior in places, and thoroughly deserves to at least replicate that book’s success.

Defence barrister Neve Harper – still grieving the disappearance of her husband some years previously – is gifted a potentially career-defining case at the last minute, following the previous counsel’s unexpected suicide. She must defend Wade Darling, who stands accused of a terrible familicide. With just a few days to go until the already much-delayed trial, Darling seems curiously reluctant to talk to her, although he denies the allegations of murdering his wife and teenage children and then burning his house to the ground. But this turns out to be the least of her worries, when, after firing Darling’s incompetent solicitor, Harper is approached by a mysterious man who tells her that if she wants to keep her career she must deliberately lose the case and ensure Darling’s conviction. If she doesn’t, she’s warned that not only will the truth about her husband come out, but all those she has ever loved, including her stepdaughter, will suffer.

Thus the stage is set. Neve must betray her principles or else risk not only her own life but also that of everyone she has ever held dear. What follows is a taut and twisted story in which Jordan skilfully mixes courtroom drama with an excellent cat-and-mouse thriller, brilliantly avoiding both the tedium that can occasionally haunt the former and the lack of plausibility that can scupper the latter. His characters are sympathetic and drawn beautifully, and we find ourselves as intrigued by the question of Wade’s guilt or innocence as we are by the survival – or otherwise – of Harper’s career. Add to this potent mix the truth of Harper’s husband’s disappearance and we have a hugely entertaining, triple-whammy of a novel.

There’s a lot to cram in, but though it clocks in at over 400 pages Conviction is written with wit and verve and it zips along nicely; not once does it feel too long. Finally, in crafting a denouement that is both surprising and inevitable, Jordan achieves that rarest of feats: a book that satisfies throughout. Not to be missed.

S J Watson is the award-winning author of the bestselling psychological thrillers “Before I Go To Sleep”, “Second Life” and “Final Cut”. Follow him on Twitter at @sj_watson

“Grass and reeds, half-submerged meadowlands, mudflats and saltings,” and “black-tailed godwits and dunlin that swirled in their hundreds of thousands…”

So Sue Hubbard evokes the flatlands of her title, in an adult remake of the much-loved, occasionally saccharine and incredibly moving war-time tale The Snow Goose by Paul Gallico; even the names of the protagonists, the artist Philip Rhayader and the girl, Freda, echo the original.

It’s a compelling story, with poor twelve-year-old Freda evacuated from the East End of London to live with a grim couple, the Willocks, in a remote corner of Lincolnshire. Theirs is a gloomy little house, without running water, electricity or gas, but a “pair of wolfish dogs”. “On the deal table the innards of a shotgun lay spread out on a filthy sheet of newspaper beside a black frying pan caked with bacon grease.”

The domestic dourness is relieved by descriptions of the pre-war and often pre-machine farming landscape, where “corn stooks sat huddled like small yellow tents on the stubble.” Mr Willock earns five shillings for dropping and treading a thousand potatoes a day into a muddy trench, occasionally helping out with lambing, fencing, and catching wildfowl with baited eel hooks.

It’s a very different world from Freda’s upbringing and further still from Rhayader’s affluent home life in Buckingham Palace Gate. Two lost souls, they begin to form an unlikely friendship when she turns up on his lighthouse doorstep with an injured goose. “It’s hurt,” she whispered… “Dunno what to do.”

I found the floaty, arty Rhayader’s troubles uncompelling, but loved Freda’s first-person narrative as she looks back over that time from old age. She’s lived a quiet and bookish life since this intense girlhood love that perhaps she only understands in retrospect, like an Anita Brookner heroine with her “packet of mint Polos in my cardigan pocket”.

The original inspiration for The Snow Goose was ornithologist and wildlife artist Peter Scott’s extraordinary lone lighthouse on the River Nene, on the Wash, which Gallico transplanted to Essex. In Flatlands Hubbard has restored the setting to the uncertain coastlines and shifting mudflats of Lincolnshire. She also changed the injured bird to a pink-footed goose, rather than a snow goose, which would be a rarity in Britain. It all makes for an ingenious and heartfelt tribute, but with a richly imagined life of its own.

As someone who found lockdown particularly difficult, this reviewer has little desire to dwell on the pandemic years. However, Simon Schama’s examination of earlier outbreaks does spark interest, obliquely casting light on our own recent covid experiences. His account of the individuals who have helped curb the devastating effects of widespread infections – often defying medical hierarchies and courting controversy in the process – ultimately presents an inspiring and hopeful read.

In Foreign Bodies, Schama has taken on an ambitious caseload. Smallpox, cholera, and bubonic plague are weighty subjects, each worthy of thorough treatment. Richly detailed, his account of outbreaks of infectious disease throughout what he terms “this late period of the human comedy”, is buoyed by his characteristically energetic narrative style. Schama’s cast of characters is vast, with compelling individuals who animate the book’s many stories of triumph over tragedy.

There are the pioneer inoculators Timoni and Pylarini, whose eighteenth-century champions include Voltaire and the swaggering polymath and traveller Charles-Marie de la Condamine – his own brush with smallpox as a child lends piquancy to his widely-translated treatise on inoculation.

Of particular interest is the story of Professor Dr Adrien Proust, French epidemiologist and father of writer Marcel, whose contributions to the study of cholera would likely eclipse his son’s literary reputation, were they better known. Proust’s travels around the Mediterranean and throughout India placed him in significant personal peril yet his work in scrupulously recording the extent of contagion resulted in far greater understanding of how disease moves through populations and across borders.

Minor figures similarly excite curiosity, such as Captain Moss, the military photographer whose grisly yet affecting shots of plague-ridden India lend visual immediacy to Schama’s vivid descriptions. He even gives special mention to the nameless outsiders so often passed over: the folk-wisdom practitioners, old-women variolators, frontrunner insufflators, and brave mothers who subjected their offspring to early forms of inoculation.

Foreign Bodies is a bustling marketplace of a book in which our attention is repeatedly drawn to intriguing yet peripheral episodes that sometimes distance us from the main action; often, a footnote would have sufficed. And while there’s charm in an author that allows him- or herself to be side-tracked, it can lead to confusion, and a continual need to backtrack. Greater authorial discipline would have been more prized by this reader, already well dosed up on the good stuff.

White supremacy has been an integral part of America since the beginning, and “whitelash” is the enduring mechanism that preserves it, says US journalist Wesley Lowery in this gripping, sometimes horrifying account.

The term “whitelash” was coined by black commentator and activist Van Jones on the night Trump was elected; he used it to describe the movement to be rid of a black president.

For white supremacists, Obama’s victory was a nightmare come true. Lowery says of what followed: “Leaders on the political right preached a politics of racial agitation: fear of immigrants and Muslims, contempt for black public figures, and rebellion against government attempts to address racial inequalities. The real fear held by many Americans [was] that the country had irreversibly changed in ways that left them unheard and vulnerable.”

This repeated a motif: “Each step toward a more racially just society, each step toward triumph gained by the anti-racist side sparks a backlash – a pull back on the rope – from the unjust system’s beneficiaries and boosters.”

The whitelash against Obama followed in the tradition of the Ku Klux Klan, founded in 1865 to restore the pre-Civil War order. When the KKK re-launched in the 1920s, “the best way to market [it] was to play to the sense among many white Americans that traditional values were under attack.”

Lowery details the suffering of the victims of supremacist violence and their families and delves into the minds of the warped killers. Compellingly awful is the story of lifelong Nazi sympathiser Glenn Miller who, aged 73, finally found the “courage” to go on a shooting spree at a Jewish community centre.

We’re also taken through every step of the Charlottesville tragedy, from a school student writing an essay asking why the city still had a Robert E Lee statue… to the mowing down of anti-racism protester Heather Heyer.

“It’s hard to look at the horizon and not see more horrors to come,” says Lowery. “The white majority grows increasingly agitated and aggrieved, [and] as long as there are elements within our mainstream politics and media willing to cynically play to those fears, we can expect additional outbursts of white racial violence.”

And there’s a wider warning. Miller wanted immigrants forcibly expelled; the Charlottesville Neo-Nazis claimed unchecked immigration would destroy American culture. We in the UK should note where such sentiments can lead.

Laura Cumming’s Thunderclap joins a wave of hybrid biographies that pursue past lives reduced to what Hilary Mantel called “what’s left in the sieve when the centuries have run through it – a few stones, scraps of writing, scraps of cloth.” The authors graft these fractured accounts onto their own lives and the story of their fitful searches for those scraps and pebbles. The best play with speculation but set it aside and give up their subject to the great vacuum of the past. They build an ornate, compelling frame around a gap that cannot be filled.

Camille Laurns’ slender Little Dancer, Aged Fourteen outlined the pinched life of Marie van Goethem, the “petit rat” sculpted by Degas, and Laurens’ efforts to scrape together a timeline for her. Karolina Ramqvist’s Bear Woman balanced the folk-tale-esque story of a woman stranded on a Canadian island in the 1540s with the author’s mysteriously complicated existence in twenty-first-century Stockholm.

Cumming has form with these hybrids: her 2019 investigative memoir On Chapel Sands probed the abduction of her mother, the artist Betty Elston, as a child.

Thunderclap alternates her memories of her father, the Scottish painter James Cumming, whose expressionist work spanned from dying Hebridean communities to microbiology, and her pursuit of Carel Fabritius, the Dutch Golden Age artist behind “The Goldfinch”, who died when 40 tonnes of gunpowder exploded in the Delft “Thunderclap” of 1654. The book also gives a tremendous sense of this truly Golden Age where some 700 painters produced over a million paintings – a partially lost world that Cumming strings into vibrant images: “a buoyant ship, a rising wave, a soaring tree, dazzling blue ice; an unexpected conversation in a parlour, the echo of light around a whitewashed church, the luminous apricot and the departing soldier, the complexity and strangeness of the world.” She recalls her family’s obsession with Dutch art, from her early encounters in Edinburgh schoolrooms to her first visit abroad as a child – a trip where her father both found inspiration and fell ill while his children were plunged – literally – into the water-logged landschap.

Fabritius left little to work with: a handful of surviving paintings including two self portraits, a few scattered records (his birth, his first marriage and loss of his wife and three children in a single year when he was twenty-one, some inventories and legal agreements, his second marriage, his unlucky death at thirty-two). He vanishes altogether for several periods of his short life, and collectors have painted over his signature, further obliterating his legacy. Her own father also presents an enigma – that of all our parents and what they did, felt or saw before we exploded into their lives as thunderclaps of a sort – and, though he died only in 1991, several of his works have already disappeared. Cumming has only a slide of one of his most famous paintings, “The Seer of Brahan”.

Fractions of other artists’ lives come into granular focus for a few paragraphs before fading in a blur of peripheral vision, like Fabritius’s sister-in-law, Maria van Pruyssen, recorded in an inventory of her sister’s household goods, which contained thirteen of her paintings and a note that she was “confined sick in mind in St Joris Hospital in Delft.” Or the flower artist Maria van Oosterwijck, who resisted marriage to her mentor and instead kept house with another woman and her orphaned nephew. Thunderclap’s shifts of focus and intensity create a written counterpart to Golden Age Dutch art – lives, just lives and still lifes, but what lives in the richness of detail, the quiddity: that luminous apricot, a doorway in Delft, an artist preparing a canvas. In both this art and Cumming’s book abounds a sheer concentration of willingness to see beauty and that “complexity and strangeness” of a world both frozen and passing into history.

I had sharpened my hatchet and prepared my Marxist denunciations, and then… I opened the covers of Cleo Watson’s debut novel, the Westminster thriller-come-bonkbuster Whips, and discovered the best political thrill ride this side of the original House of Cards novels. Watson is an insider – from a well-connected family and most recently employed in the seedy world of SW1 as a de facto nanny to man-child prime minister, Boris Johson – and Whips feels as realistic as any book set in Westminster can.

Watson writes sex with a matter-of-factness that makes it hot and heavy rather than cringe-inducing. The opening of the book, taking the reader from a wide-angle shot of the end of a day in parliament to an extreme close-up of a sexually-voracious MP’s vulva, with a lover’s head buried in it, is sensational.

In a note at the start of the book, Watson tells the inevitable readers among MPs, researchers, spads, and other parliamentary hangers-on, that what she has written is fiction and people should not assume they see themselves in the story (“It’s not all about you.”) It is the one part of the book where my disbelief ceased to be suspended. The book clearly hums with real-life affairs, and rumours turned mildly fictional. It will be a Westminster parlour game to point out all the allusions and barely-concealed references.

Watson achieves the same kind of tone as Jilly Cooper – it’s a hot romp with enough humour and literary turns to be addictively readable. Whips centres on the fall of the prime minister, Madeleine Ford, as a cast of total shits – MPs, aides and hangers-on – plots to destroy, then succeed her. And while plotting, they shag endlessly in all kinds of enjoyable combinations.

I’ve read other reviews which sneer that while Whips is “fun” it is “hardly going to win the Booker Prize”. But maybe it should. Writing sex that is actually hot is hard; even most women go limp when required to find the right words for the mechanics of the dirty business and the dirtier talk that should go with it. Watson hasn’t written an embarrassing book, though people may hide the cover on the Tube. Instead, it’s an instant classic of bonking bad behaviour and Boris-Johnsonian fuckery.

The Sunday Times review of Whips claims it’s “not a sexy book” but I think that’s just an example of reviewers wanting to conceal what gets them off and what turns them on. Politics nerds will get off on this book and readers of Cooper classics like Riders will love it too. What’s not to like about a novel where a cabinet minister is being teased with a remote-controlled vibrator by her chief civil servant while she gives evidence to a select committee? Or where the same minister is on the phone to a journalist while getting head from her press secretary? Erotic thrillers should be erotic and thrilling. Whips does both.

The only ardour killer is that its central characters are Tories who I want to get fucked but not be fucked. The only thing worse than not having sex is knowing some odious cabinet minister is having lots of it. In that respect, Watson has accidentally written a horror story.