Five by Ilona Bannister

Published by Crown on May 5, 2026

Five is the number of characters who might die before the novel Five ends. We know someone will die because Ilona Bannister tells us that in the novel’s early pages. Bannister describes the potential dead as “the child, the mother, the businessman, the old woman, and the gambler.” We know them as Gideon, Emma, Liam, Mrs. Worth, and Sonny.

The plot is organized around those characters as they converge in a subway station. Some are on the track as a delayed train begins to approach. One has decided to commit suicide. A character who remains on the platform is having a heart attack. The child is balance-walking along the lip of the platform as the train approaches. Their fates unfold in minutes, but the death drama is broken up by backstories that take the reader on a journey through each life, from infancy to the present.

Gideon is the child from hell. He never bonded with his mother Emma. He disobeys her, hits her with her high heel shoe, booby traps the cupboard so a rolling pin will fall on her when she opens it. Child psychologists have done nothing to improve his behavior. Nannies have quit, the most recent one after Gideon crapped in her shoes. When Gideon, having escaped Emma’s grasp, almost falls onto the subway tracks, she briefly considers not catching him.

If Gideon is the child from hell, Mrs. Worth might be the mother from hell. Not her fault, really, given her own motherless childhood. Mrs. Worth (she hates the name Matilda) was raised by a father who was a surgeon in the war until the atrocities he observed caused him to lose his grip. As a child, Matilda’s father taught her how to dissect dead animals, some of which (including the neighbor’s dog) he kills for that purpose. Mrs. Worth, now a pathologist, is distant from her own son (conceived by one of the lovers whose sexual performance she charted in her lab notes), a distance that grew when she realized she was turning into her father.

Sonny was another bad kid, in the sense that he’s hyperactive and has no use for rules that are meant to restrain him. By the time he reaches the subway platform in his late twenties, Sonny has a serious gambling addiction and has given up on himself. He understands that he doesn’t “fit into a world that was not built for people like him.”

Sonny was in nursery school when his father died. His mother Luna, beside herself with grief, can’t take Sonny out in public for fear that his misbehavior will annoy others. In challenging Sonny’s teachers to be less boring. Luna won’t admit that her son has any problems of his own making because doing so would cause her to blame herself for not raising him properly.

Liam grew up in a poor family with a disabled brother and devoted mother. Liam and his brother Danny overcame hardships, grew a business, and hired Emma as their CFO. Liam marries a woman and stays with her until she becomes “a bit old and puffy.” While he is with his third wife, Emma decides he would be a perfect sperm donor. But Liam’s story is less about Emma and more about the damage he does to his relationship with his brother because he fears he will lose Danny to the caregiver Danny loves.

So will one of them really die? Ilona Bannister telegraphs the outcome well before it arrives: “There is no open-ended scene where you are left guessing if perhaps everyone survives in the end and the story is just a comment on the fragility of the human condition and the diversity of human suffering: a clever mechanism to remind us that everyone has a story, and not everyone is who or what they seem.” But that’s exactly what the novel is, regardless of the outcome. Five people with complex histories are together in a moment that will shape the rest of four lives and end the fifth.

Bannister assumes that readers will pick a favorite character for an early grave and will root for others to survive. She then challenges the reader to ask why one character is “worthy of surviving in the internal universe of your brain” while another is not. The novel’s brilliance lies in that philosophical inquiry.

Motherhood is a theme that ties the stories together. Even when mothers do their best, they are blamed for the sins of their children. Mothers, “even if they were good mothers, even if they had sacrificed for and loved their boys, even if they had given them good homes, were still and always would be the bad mothers of terrible sons.”

Bannister plays with the novel’s form, occasionally using her narrative voice to speak directly to the reader, as when she explains to readers that they might view surviving characters as having metaphorically died in part, “if you like those kinds of metaphors. Metaphors about life and death, or the death of the spirit versus the death of the body, or the death of the past to enable the birth of the future, these are always good topics to raise in book club when the conversation lags.” Because talking about metaphors is easier than talking about why we wanted a particular character to die. I’m not usually a fan of an author’s intrusion into the narrative, but Bannister guides the reader to lessons that are too important to miss.

The story is sad but life-affirming. Do you deserve a better fate than her characters, Bannister asks. It doesn’t matter what we think we deserve. We all live for a time, experiencing moments of pain and moments of joy before we inevitably die. An author can decide which character will die but, in life, those choices seem random. All we can know is that “life and death happen because they do.” At the same time, Five is a testament to “how extraordinary ordinary people are.”

Five delivers the tension of a thriller and the deep character development of a literary novel. Bannister’s prose is precise in its depiction of human nature. She is brutal in her honest observation of human failings but compassionate in her understanding of human weaknesses. Five is the best novel I’ve read in 2026 and may be the best novel I’ll read this year.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

The Teacher by Tim Sullivan

First published in Great Britain in 2024; published by Atlantic Crime on May 5, 2026

George Cross is among the most entertaining protagonists in the modern world of crime novels. He suffers from Autism Spectrum Condition (he used to call it Asperger’s Syndrome but he’s changed his preference). Perhaps his co-workers suffer more than George, because he fails to recognize social cues and is thus unintentionally rude to everyone. When people get to know him (as readers quickly do), they realize that he makes the best of what he’s got, and what he’s got is focus and tenacity. When George locks onto an unsolved murder, his mind doesn’t rest until he’s found the solution. But what George doesn’t have is ill will. He simply wants the truth to come out and can’t understand why anyone else would have a different agenda.

The Teacher develops George and surrounding characters a bit less than earlier Cross novels. To the extent that Tim Sullivan adds to his well-developed characters, family plays a strong role in the novel. Mothers are particularly important. A subplot involves as the mother of George’s work partner, DS Josie Ottey, who now lives with Josie in one of those uncomfortable adult mother-daughter relationships.

George’s mother is back in his life. Her husband has recently died and she’s hanging out with George’s father, the most stable element of George’s universe. His father accepts him for who he is and keeps him anchored. George is starting to fret about how he will survive when his father passes, a worry that humanizes George and helps the reader appreciate that, whatever his condition might be called, he is still a human who deserves empathy and understanding.

The plot follows a formula that serves mystery writers well. It starts with a murder. Alistair Moreton has been stabbed in the heart with a chisel. His German Shepard mourns his master’s death, although that may be the only creature who will miss Alistair.

The story then introduces a number of plausible suspects, starting with a next-door neighbor, Barnaby Cotterell, who shared a driveway with Alistair and was hot-headed about Alistair’s maintenance of the hedges. But Alistair used to be a sadistic headmaster and there is no shortage of former students who have vowed to see him in his grave. Some resent him for making his son the head boy. The son, Sandy Moreton, is now a member of parliament, although another of Alistair’s students, Richard Brook, got Sandy recalled for bullying his staff. Like father, like son, it seems.

It turns out that Alistair developed a drug addiction after he had hip surgery. When his doctor wouldn’t prescribe more narcotics, he found a supplier. Two men then moved into his house, keeping him high with their supply while they used his residence as a base for their drug distribution. And then there’s Malcolm Fisk, who once accused Alistair of kidnapping his daughter. They are among the many suspects Cross interrogates as he tries to identify the killer.

A new detective, DI Bobby Warner, is filling in from another jurisdiction. He quickly settles on Cotterell as the killer and devotes his time to proving his theory is correct, a common method of police work that leads to the conviction of innocent people. The method is anathema to Cross, who soon finds himself at odds with Warner.

Warner is also at odds with police staffer Alice Mackenzie, an attractive young woman who doesn’t appreciate Warner’s aggressive sexual interest. Men who don’t know how to behave with women and the institutional protection they enjoy is a recurring theme in the story.

It’s no surprise but immensely satisfying when Cross proves that Warner’s theory is unsound. Alice is a bit more physical in teaching Warner a lesson. Cross finds the killer by turning his obsessive attention to the clues until he pieces them together in a new way. He’s assisted by the efforts of forensic investigator Michael Swift, who fancies himself a Watson to Cross’ Holmes. Several dogs enter the story and Swift’s ability to identify the dogs helps Cross identify the killer.

In book after book, Tim Sullivan delivers all the elements of a classic whodunit. I love the series, however, for Sullivan’s ability to create likeable characters while reminding readers that compassion and understanding are essential components of a meaningful life.

RECOMMENDED

Ghost Town by Tom Perrotta

Published by Scribner on April 28, 2026

“When you’re thirteen, you don’t know what to think or who to believe.” Ghost Town is the sad coming-of-age story of a 13-year-old whose mother has just died. Adults assure him that his mother is in heaven but “it felt fake — too good to be true — like a story adults had invented to make children feel better and ended up believing themselves.”

The story lives in the memory of Jimmy Perrini, who thinks back to a fateful summer in 1974. One of Jimmy’s teachers is a far-right bigot whose brother died in Vietnam. He won’t tolerate any dissent about the war and has no use for hippies or nonwhite people in Creamwood, New Jersey. Jimmy has no experience with people of color until Wayne, his hippie cousin, moves into the house next door with his mixed wife Nilda and her Black cousin Hector.

Intermittent returns to 2024 reveal that Jimmy is now best known as Jay Perry, an author who was experiencing declining sales for his literary novels before writing a successful YA series that turned into an even more successful television show for kids. With some trepidation, he returns to Creamwood to attend an event honoring his father. He makes the trip because he is tired of denying the past. “It felt like I was finally ready to face up to it, to reclaim those missing years, the world I’d left behind.” He is surprised by how racially diverse the town has become in his absence.

The 1974 story gets moving after Jimmy becomes overwhelmed after hearing his mother’s voice at her funeral. As he flees from the funeral home, Eddie Fitzpatrick pulls up in his Chevy Vega and offers Jimmy a ride. A bit younger than Jimmy’s sister Denise, Eddie does little that summer except smoke pot and cruise the streets, occasionally making unsuccessful attempts to impress girls.

Jimmy and Eddie begin to cruise the town regularly, always in the evening, and Jimmy eventually accepts Eddie’s offer to take some hits from his joints. Jimmy enjoys being high and indulges regularly after that first experience. Jimmy adopts a routine of riding with Eddie until he concludes that the Vega is haunted by the ghost of its original owner.

Jimmy knows his mother would have grounded him “for the rest of his life if she’d found out that he was smoking pot with a high school kid and staying out way past his curfew. But that was the thing— she wasn’t alive anymore and the rules were different now.” His father is a firefighter who, lost in his own world after his wife’s death, never keeps his promises to spend more time with Jimmy and devotes little effort to supervising him.

Jimmy has a not-quite girlfriend named Janie, but while he was away from school in the week after his mother’s death, Janie began to date his best friend Greg. When Janie’s family leaves for the summer, her friend Olivia offers to use her Ouija board to help Jimmy communicate with his mother. They make contact with a spirit (or so it seems to Jimmy) but it isn’t Jimmy’s mother. A later Ouija board sessions summons still a different ghost.

Although Olivia is two years older and six inches taller than Jimmy, she quickly inspires him to forget about Janie. A fleeting sexual experience — Jimmy’s first of any significance — enlivens the plot until he hears his mother’s voice, causing him to flee from Olivia just as he fled from his mother’s funeral. Whether the admonishing voice comes from Jimmy’s dead mother or his conscience is for the reader to decide, as is the real or imagined appearance of his mother’s ghost as the story nears its end. Jimmy might not believe in heaven, but he comes to believe in the enduring power of his mother’s love.

In addition to its flirtation with the spirit world, race relations are a dominant theme. Creamwood is a white community and many of its residents want it to stay that way. Eddie’s pot dealer, a loser who has no moral authority to judge anyone else, is one of those. He is particularly antagonistic to Hector, despite Hector’s generous nature and friendly demeanor. That animosity appears to play a role in the novel’s defining moment.

Ghost Town is a low-key novel that underplays its climax. It always seems that the story will lead to an eventful moment (because that’s what coming-of-age stories do), but it isn’t clear what that moment will be until it happens. The life-changing event is dramatic, but the reader learns little of its immediate impact on Jimmy because he repressed the memory. In the novel’s final pages, having returned to Creamwood fifty years later, Jimmy finally makes sense of it as best he can.

Like the movie American Graffiti, Ghost Town creates a sense of nostalgia for a lost time, a youthful summer of cars and shifting friendships and doomed love. Ghost Town takes a darker tone, however, in its depiction of Creamwood as a community that is hostile to social progress. Some of this understandably goes over the head of 13-year-old Jimmy, while the adult version of himself is pleased that small-minded residents of his childhood home could not stand in the way of progressive change.

Ghost Town evokes a mixture of sweet and sad emotions. Still, it doesn’t stand apart from other coming-of-age novels that have covered the same ground. Perrotta pushes all the right buttons, but I can’t say that he achieves anything new or particularly memorable. The appearance of Jimmy's mother's ghost at the novel's end is a bit sappy, although plenty of readers will appreciate the sap. The novel has enough strong moments to earn a recommendation, but its familiarity robs it of emotional resonance.

RECOMMENDED

Fair Chase by Travis Mulhauser

Published by Grand Central Publishing on April 28, 2026

I’m always happy to find a thriller that doesn’t depend on tough guys saving the world by clobbering bad guys. It’s not that I don’t enjoy tough guy heroics, but is that the only way to write a thriller? Travis Mulhauser proves that crime stories can be exciting without introducing protagonists whose fists or guns dominate the narrative.

Fair Chase takes place in the fictional Cutler County, Michigan. A resort economy sustains the county residents, some of whom claim to have seen a gray wolf. Local businessmen and government officials insist that they saw a large coyote.

Residents worry that a wolf will eat their pets or scare away vacationers. Some are panicking because they fear a wolf that settles into the local environment will attract more wolves. Of greater concern to resort owners is the risk that resort construction will be halted by environmental studies if endangered wolves suddenly appear.

A few rowdy residents vow to take up arms and illegally hunt the wolf. They are the typical tough-talking blowhards who could stand ten feet from a wolf in the woods and never spot it. A shady guy named Davenport, however, hires Darnette Lewis to kill the wolf. Darnette is a young man fresh out of prison who needs cash. He has few skills beyond the ability to track and kill animals. Davenport promises to give Darnette a healthy payment, assuming he can dispose of the wolf’s body before anyone can prove that a wolf has entered the county.

The Sawbrook family owns forested land between the Crow River and Lake Michigan. Lucy Sawbrook is part of that family. She’s also a game warden who understands the importance of protecting the wolf. She knows that if wolves take up residence in the county, locals will rarely see them and will eventually learn to coexist, just as they live with bears and bobcats. Lucy understands that people freak out when their fears are stoked, but know they will eventually “get bored and need something new to worry over when this doesn’t pan out to be the end of the world.”

This branch of the Sawbrook family — consisting of Lucy, her sister Jewell, her brother Buckner and his wife Sky — is less villainous than the family’s reputation would suggest. When a young man named Delos Harris shows up claiming to be a Sawbrook, they quickly recognize him as one of their own.

Delos served some time in a juvenile prison and was most recently living with a foster family, but when his foster father threatened to hunt for the wolf, Delos stole the man’s rifle and fled. Delos feels a kinship with the wolf and wants to protect it. His need to protect the wolf is one reason the Sawbrooks accept him as one of their own.

The story turns into the chase that the title implies — Darnette, Delos, and the Sawbrooks all chase the wolf, with its fate to be decided by whichever person reaches it first. Fair Chase is also the story of a family sticking together to protect the things they value — their land, their independence, and a wolf. Perhaps the wolf symbolizes the Sawbrook family. The Sawbrooks deliberately live apart from human society and, like the wolf, are seen as a threat by many members of the larger community.

Buckner makes the interesting point that society’s view of wolves is dictated by emotion rather than reason. Nobody cares if a wolf kills a barn cat, “but kill one of Mrs. Jennings’s cats and it’d be a five-alarm fire. It’s just like with humans. Certain kinds you can get away with doing whatever you want to them, other kinds you can’t so much as look at them sideways.” Delos is the kind of kid society might throw away, the kind who can be victimized while people with power turn their heads. He’s a sympathetic character because he has greater respect for wolves than he has for selfish landowners who believe their profits are more important than an endangered species.

The story moves forcefully to a poweful conclusion. Travis Mulhauser’s occasional forays into philosophy give the novel a bit of intellectual heft, but the book is a standout because of its authentic characters. Their fidelity to family and to nature imbues them with a kind of honor. The real predators in the story are not wolves but greedy resort owners.The Sawbrooks and Delos earn the reader’s respect by bending the law to protect a wolf, a more noble purpose for bending the law than protecting profits.

RECOMMENDED

Mrs. Shim Is a Killer by Kang Jiyoung

First published in South Korea in 2010; published in translation by Harper Perennial on April 21, 2026

Mrs. Shim Is a Killer is only the second crime novel from South Korea that I can recall reading. The first, The Plotters, is notable for its strong characterizations and careful storytelling. Mrs. Shim Is a Killer adopts a lighter tone but is equally enjoyable, albeit for different reasons.

The novel is impressively constructed. Each chapter holds a delightful surprise. The chapters are linked together, but for most of the novel, each chapter introduces, and focuses upon, a new character. Each character comes with a unique backstory. Because the novel’s destination is never clear, the plot is unpredictable.

There is a farcical edge to Mrs. Shim Is a Killer, first noticeable when Mrs. Shim, with very little contemplation, agrees to become a contract killer in exchange for a bar of gold. Mrs. Shim (first name Eunok) is an ajumma, which roughly translates as middle-aged woman. She is 51 when the novel begins. She just lost her job at a butcher’s shop because the owner was arrested at a gambling den. Her husband owned his own butcher’s shop but he died after driving his car into a pub. Since her husband was nearly blind, the police decided that he committed suicide so Eunok received no insurance payout. She had to sell her husband’s shop to pay for damages to the pub.

Eunok is still caring for a son and daughter and doesn’t know how to cope with her financial woes. Because an ajumma cannot easily find employment, she doesn’t expect anything to come of the ad seeking an ajumma for a high-paying position at a detective agency.

Korean detective agencies do the usual investigations into cheating husbands, but the story suggests that a couple of agencies are willing to solve a client’s problems by eliminating their source. The Smile Private Detective Agency provides that service. The firm’s CEO, Park Taesang, was its star killer, but he wants to recruit someone new to take on that role. Eunok’s skill with knives, honed during her career as a butcher, makes her a perfect fit, if you don’t count the fact that she has no history of murdering people.

Kang Jiyoung’s decision to turn a middle-aged widow into a knife-wielding assassin was clearly made with tongue in cheek, but Kang makes it easy to suspend disbelief. In the universe created by the story — a universe in which an ajumma is such an unlikely person to hold any job that isn’t menial, much less the job of assassin — the job offer and Eunok’s easy acceptance of her new profession seems natural.

Until the novel nears its end, each chapter tells a new story, each as interesting as the last. Each chapter sheds a different light on the chapters that came before. One story is about a cop who sacrificed his relationship with a son who now wants him dead because he arrested the villain who his son believed to be his true father. Another is a variant of Cyrano de Bergerac, involving a man who took credit for writing a love letter that was actually written by someone else (the story ends with a murder). Other stories are equally offbeat. Kang’s ability to flesh out the primary story with engaging background tales assured that my interest never wavered.

Only as the story approaches its end does the focus return to Eunok. By that time, her son is an apprentice killer for a rival agency, although mother and son are hiding their professions from each other. At the same time, the rival CEOs of two detective agencies want to kill each other, a development that pits mother and son assassins against each other. At the same time, another novice ajumma killer (this one the wife of a cop) enters the story.

Readers may need a spreadsheet to keep track of all the characters and their relationships to each other. The novel often has the feel of a comedy of errors as characters take extreme actions to conceal the truth from each other. The story is entertaining precisely for that reason. The plot follows unexpected routes as it hops from character to character and it is wildly impossible to accept at face value. Nevertheless, the novel’s construction is so clever and the characters are so sympathetic that the unlikely story did not distract from the pleasure I took in following it to its unexpectedly happy and satisfying destination.

RECOMMENDED