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Anatomy of a Killer is Romy Hausmann’s third thriller, first published in her native German as Perfect Day and translated into English by Jamie Bulloch. She made waves with her 2020 debut, Dear Child – due out as a Netflix series later this year – which was translated around the world to great acclaim. A television freelancer who lives in a remote house in the woods near Stuttgart, Hausmann’s nightmarish second crime novel, Sleepless, and now the excellent Anatomy, have followed in quick succession.

Like Victoria Selman’s Truly, Darkly, Deeply, Hausman examines the devastating psychological aftermath of discovering that an adored, and adoring, loved one might actually be a brutal killer. Unlike Selman’s book, which starts with the main character’s stepfather already found guilty and imprisoned, Ann is present when her beloved father – internationally renowned philosophy professor and anthropologist Walter Lesniak – is arrested on suspicion of being Berlin’s infamous “ribbon murderer”.

Her life ripped to shreds alongside her father’s, Ann relocates under an assumed name and begins work in a fast-food restaurant, while attempting to reconcile the father she thought she knew with the twisted killer who abducted and brutally murdered a series of young girls, using red ribbons as a trail to their bodies.

Despite evidence of the killer treating his victims in ways that echo her own childhood, Ann cannot believe her devoted father to be capable of such dreadful acts. Surely it’s a coincidence he once tied a red ribbon around her Christmas gift, a trampoline too large to be wrapped? Either way, he looks almost certain to be found guilty when the case goes to trial, and it doesn’t help his defence that Lesniak is refusing to talk, even to his own lawyer.

Convinced that the case for the prosecution rests on circumstantial evidence and an inadequately thorough investigation, it’s down to Ann to prove her father’s innocence by identifying the real murderer. Thus begins a beautifully dark cat-and-mouse tale in which no one is quite who they seem. This superior thriller sees Ann pushed outside her comfort zone and forced to confront demons of her own. The twists, when they inevitably come, are satisfyingly grounded in the reality of the story – increasingly rare nowadays – and Hausmann wisely avoids anything too outlandish to score the coveted you’ll never see it coming tag.

Bulloch’s translation is beautiful too; he and Hausmann tell the story in evocative prose that serves the interiority of Ann’s predicament. While not quite up there with Out by Natsuo Kirino (translated from the Japanese by Stephen Snyder), this is a fantastic read and I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see it on our screens before long.

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

In a lifelong career as an ocean conservationist, I’ve never met anyone who’s devoted their entire life to seaweed – until now. Even though every budding marine biologist in the UK learns about seaweed zonation on their first field trip, happily pottering between the high-water mark and the ocean, most quickly forget the rich variety of seaweed forms – and their wonderful range of reds, greens and browns – as soon as their scientific curiosity moves offshore. But now seaweed seems to be cropping up everywhere, not only as one of the hot topics at last summer’s UN Ocean Conference, but also as the star ingredient in the “smoked cod chowder with Welsh sugar kelp” at my recent birthday celebration. Seaweed paper even forms the dust cover of Vincent Doumeizel’s signed, £50 limited edition of The Seaweed Revolution, a book that may do for seaweed what Entangled Life did for fungi.

Doumeizel, a Frenchman, describes himself as an “author, rock singer, United Nations seaweed activist, optimistic traveller and world citizen”. As a senior advisor on oceans to the UN Global Compact, he can take much of the credit for this new-found enthusiasm for marine algae. The English translation was recently launched at the Natural History Museum to much fanfare, including sea shanties belted out by a group from landlocked but bookish Hay-on-Wye. On stage the author fizzed with excitement – a seaweed evangelist.

He is out to convince us that seaweeds – or sea vegetables as he suggests we call them, to reinforce their nutritional value and remove any negative connotations – are the planet’s untapped resource that could provide sustainable and non-polluting solutions to “practically everything!” Seaweed species, he argues, possess so many superpowers, they could transform food, medicine, agriculture, livestock, cosmetics and textile sectors. They can even provide substitutes for petrochemicals and could reverse the trend of global warming.

The book zips through the evolution of the different taxa of macroalgae, the properties that have enabled them to thrive through millennia, and their possible applications. With a family member who has cystic fibrosis, I was particularly cheered to learn that a Norwegian company is developing an alginate spray derived from a brown seaweed that may help protect sufferers from the bacteria that settle in their lungs and aggravate their breathing.

While I am all for promulgating ocean optimism, this book’s failing is that some of its claims are not backed up by the best available science. The author promotes some courses of action that could even add to our ocean woes. Of greatest concern is the assertion that seaweed ecosystems are a form of “blue carbon” that can be used to draw down vast quantities of CO2 from the atmosphere and then be sunk so that the carbon is locked away in the deep ocean. Unfortunately, recent research from the University of Tasmania has identified a flaw in previous calculations and suggests that most seaweed ecosystems may not be a carbon sink after all, but a source.

To incentivise a massive scaling up of seaweed as a tool for reversing climate change, Doumeizel advocates carbon offsetting using carbon credits – dodgy for reasons previously set out by Wade Graham in this magazine. Unsurprisingly, however, this is proving irresistible umami (seaweed has it in spades) to tech giants such as Elon Musk, Microsoft and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos who are already pouring money in.

The call for a massive scaling up of seaweed cultivation comes wrapped in a gung-ho attitude towards the large-scale alteration of marine ecosystems. Having witnessed the stinking algae bloom that annually swamps China’s Shandong coastline – a detrimental impact of the expansion of seaweed farming – Doumeizel’s casual dismissal of highly and fully protected marine areas, and his downplaying of the precautionary approach, are shocking.

The Seaweed Revolution is an engaging read about what was once a somewhat overlooked and definitely underutilised group of organisms, but you may want to take some of its claims with a pinch of sea salt.

In ‘Random Rules’ on Silver Jews’ third album, American Water, David Berman offers a glorious opening line for an unwritten novel:

In 1984, I was hospitalised for approaching perfection / Slowly screwing my way across Europe, they had to make a correction

I mention Berman because the poet and singer-songwriter, who took his own life in August 2019 – less than a month after his final album was released – is the subject of the dedication in Patrick deWitt’s fourth novel The Librarianist.

deWitt and Berman were friends and contributors to the semi-legendary US literary journal The Minus Times, and their work is interested in similar ideas, characters and settings; the United States and Canada at their most cigarette-stained; down on their luck, or simply utterly-out-of-luck people lounging in the lukewarm water of their failures.

The Librarianist – a beautiful, lyrical, and meditative novel – is that kind of character study. Bob Comet, a retired librarian, who we meet aged 71 as he goes about his days in a fashion that some reviewers – with more exciting lives than mine?! – call “unremarkable”. I liked Bob and I wanted the best for him. I think you will too.

He lives in a mint-green house that belonged to his mother, and “[has] no friends per se; his phone [does] not ring, and he [has] no family”. The reader meets him in 2005 and Comet has spent 46 years trying to get over his wife jilting him for his best friend, just after the start of what he thought would be a happy marriage.

The narrative moves to Bob in his twenties; he becomes a librarian and meets the woman who will desert him, and the friend who will become his nemesis. The book jumps again to Bob aged eleven, running away from home and finding a life of adventure with a pair of eccentric theatrical women (just two of the wonderful supporting cast). This melancholy book reminded me of the downbeat genius of Harvey Pekar’s American Splendour – high praise.

deWitt gives us a Thoreau man, “[living a life] of quiet desperation” and elevates him. Bob laments the “smallness of his existence”, but the book makes you celebrate it.

Paula Cocozza’s “difficult second novel” is indeed difficult, but then so was her first, How To Be Human. I should clarify – by difficult I don’t mean, of either of them, difficult to understand, or to read, or to enjoy. I mean that they are about difficult people finding human existence difficult, as in, complicated. And that neither she nor her characters take easy ways out.

In How To Be Human, which Hilary Mantel found “intriguing and subversive”, the protagonist Mary fell besotted with a handsome urban fox (the actual animal, not an older gentleman), which led to a certain blurring of lines and misplacement of sanity. Speak To Me develops out of a not dissimilar situation: a woman’s relationship with a reality which, despite (or perhaps because of) society being based entirely on profligate promises, is not up to scratch. The fox role is played here by two unlikely yet appropriate items working above their usual pay grade: an old leather case, and a phone. Both items, though technically inanimate, are of course containers; here, they are deeply freighted with meaning and emotion, pasts and futures and the potential lack thereof.

Susan and Karl have moved to a new-build home in a cul de sac shaped like a keyhole, in a half-built development. How’s that for an unstable-yet-stultifying bit of landscape? Susan is obsessed with the leather case, seemingly lost in the move, possibly hidden or stolen by Kurt. And Kurt is obsessed with his smartphone, which Susan may be about to murder.

What’s in Susan’s bag? Letters. What’s in the letters? An old, awkwardly finished love affair, and ergo also the man involved, and the lost dreams, and the unsatisfactory nature of everything, and maybe the answers. What’s in Kurt’s phone though? Sod knows. The end of their marriage? The love he’s no longer giving her? Kurt has become a mystery, lost to technology. He is even more absent from Susan than her teenage sons are.

Cocozza has a spiky way with safety and delusion, and grey areas which, particularly in her realistic domestic setting, are quite unsettling. But this is no hot thriller-style psychological family-drama page-turner of blood and vicious revenge. It remains cool, sharp and precise, through some quite extreme emotional, mental and physical unravelling. Although in the first person, the writing maintains a constant, slight and somehow wrong-footing distance, which makes the reader fear almost more for what this woman, with her awkward perspectives and out-of-kilter understandings, is doing to herself. It’s also terribly funny.  “Inside me, Kurt” is now a phrase I shall never forget.

The central character in this gripping book, Wasteland: The Dirty Truth About What We Throw Away, Where It Goes and Why It Matters, is… you. Or rather, every one of us. Franklin-Wallis has done a masterful job investigating the rubbish we produce and what happens to it. It’s a horrifying story tempered with glimpses of optimism.

Most likely you don’t know what really happens to your household refuse, or to old smartphones, hospital detritus, sewage, industrial chemicals and nuclear waste… and you may not want to know. But if you do, this page-turner is packed with uncomfortable answers.

Franklin-Wallis keeps everything at a human level as he interviews people around the world whose lives and work are touched by waste disposal. He has a novelist’s eye for details that illuminate every step of his journey into the heart of darkness, from trash mountains in India to huge incinerators in the UK, and nuclear storage facilities handling toxic waste that will last for 100,000 years.

Some myths are disposed of, not least in the field of recycling. “There is little doubt that recycling most materials is a better solution than burying or incinerating. The problem,” he says bluntly, “is plastic. Plastics do not disintegrate so much as divide… Macroplastics become microplastics become nanoplastics. By then they are small enough to enter our bloodstreams, our brains, the placentas of unborn children.”

Plastic manufacturers have followed the 1950s playbook of the US packaging industry; it funded anti-litter campaigns, putting the onus (and guilt) on consumers, not itself. Similarly, Keep Britain Tidy has long been funded by the packaging industry, including Coca-Cola, Nestlé and McDonald’s.
“Big Plastic,” he says, “began to spend tens of millions of dollars promoting recycling [but], in private, even the plastics industry did not consider recycling a realistic solution.”

And the danger of our domestic focus on recycling is that “all the waste that went into the manufacture and transport of the product to get it to your home” is ignored. We need to acknowledge “the inherent waste within everything we make and consume,” he urges.

Repairing, re-using, composting and buying less stuff are small things we can each do. Yet big solutions are urgently needed. In 1858, the Thames was filled with excrement, people were fainting in the streets from the stench, and cholera was rampant – so London began a fifteen-year project of new sewer construction. Our present situation might sound bleak, says Franklin-Wallis, “but we’ve solved a waste crisis before”.

Caitlin! Moran! loves! exclamation! marks! The introduction to her latest manual – emphasis on the first syllable this time – is covered in so many exclamation marks that they seem to serve as literary hundreds-and-thousands, further sweetening an already tooth-rotting tone. Caitlin Moran also loves BIG statements on BIG ideas delivered in the tone of a rather precocious girl who stomps over to you in the playground and sits, swinging her Doc Martens, as she tries to explain exactly why you are liking the wrong bands and chatting up all the wrong girls in precisely the wrong way.

Caitlin Moran is e-numbers and energy; she is convinced – as befits someone who has been in possession of a national newspaper column since her late teens – that she can easily tackle any topic in a reasonably entertaining manner. What About Men? reaches that bar but does not jump much higher. It’s a mother of daughters deciding that she can understand what’s going on with boys mostly by talking to some of her friends, her daughters’ friends, and her husband; it’s either an optimistic and enthusiastic try or a total cheek that she wouldn’t accept from a man.

What About Men? is the real sequel to her million selling memoir How To Be A Woman. As a man who used to be a boy, I found it deeply infuriating. Anyone bringing up a son now will probably feel the same. Moran delights in practically every stereotype about men – from teenagers to middle-aged variants – with a casual arrogance. Boys, she tells us, are porn-addled and addicted to Andrew Tate; they love football; they hit each other; they establish who the “alpha boys” are; they all love “banter”; they are all baffled by girls; they are seemingly all straight. Gay men barely appear in What About Men? and bisexual men don’t make it at all.

According to Moran’s Man Panel, “no one tells you how to be a man”. This is categorically untrue. There is never any shortage of people and media telling boys how to be a man – fathers (either explicitly or implicitly), mothers, grandparents, siblings, friends, enemies, teachers, doctors, TV shows, movies, adverts, music… there is no shortage of “advice”.

By relying on friends, her husband, her daughters’ friends and contributions from the tame legions of her Twitter following, Moran relies a narrow sampling of modern men. It leads her to claim that men don’t do emotions or speak to their mates about their worries. I’ve known my best friend for 28 years and we have always talked about our emotions. Our approach to masculinity is as common as men wracked with anger and frustration. But Moran needs a problem to solve so she boils men down to a set of joke-enabling archetypes: cheerful dumbos, cheerless himbos and violent maniacs.

There are men like the ones Moran sketches, but they tend to come from a particular strain of straight English men. What does Moran’s book say about me or most of my friends and male relations? Precisely – and I’m sure with her many jokes about balls, Moran will appreciate this phrase – cock all. Inevitably she dedicates a whole chapter to cocks, which she finds deeply fascinating and hilarious.

Moran’s book is relentlessly heteronormative, and its model of masculinity is as regressive and restrictive as the ones she disdains. Defenders of this book – which will sell millions regardless – will argue, “It’s just for laughs, who cares?”

But it’s not about men at all. Like everything Moran writes, her subject is: Caitlin Moran. Men are this book’s vehicle for anecdotes about Caitlin Moran, and the thoughts of Caitlin Moran. She’s very funny, but there is a danger in going for years without experiencing the mortifying silence of no one laughing at their gags. Moran is a star and, when you’re a star, people keep laughing even when you’re talking balls.