On the march, she’d seen the Slingerland family and the Van der Hurk family, but she didn’t know where they had ended up. The guard led Mary and her family to a small house with a yard and fence, then ushered them toward the house. One side of the yard was dug out for a garden, although it looked as if it had been trampled recently. The house was a decent size for a family home, but not for the masses of women and children crowding inside the camp.

Nick Harkaway’s new novel, Titanium Noir, continues in this vein. A mash-up of science fiction and hard-boiled detective story, it starts out promisingly enough. Cal Sounder, a “police consultant,” investigates the murder of a Titan, aged 90 but due to advances in technology inhabiting a 30-year-old’s body (and, when alive, standing more than seven feet tall). Cal’s investigation into this “dead nerd” spirals into unforeseen nooks and crannies, with dangerous repercussions.

The result is a sweeping, old-fashioned yarn about disaster at sea. The book’s subtitle (A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder) accurately describes what awaits the reader. And if The Wager falls short in places, it’s not due to a lack of drama inherent in mutiny and murder on a desolate, far-off island. A key question underpins this account—that is, when differing individuals offer differing accounts of what occurred, whom can we believe?

In several stories, Hadley plays fast and loose with point of view. This may be jarring at first, but readers soon understand there are further twists in perspective yet to come. In “Men,” the point of view flits from one character to another before settling on Michelle, who works in a high-end restaurant, and Jan, Michelle’s long-estranged younger sister, whose hair is “old-gold color, a silky cut, feathered onto her shoulders.”

In the days to come, Meredith bonds with her rescuer, Nina Willis, and a young Frenchman, Jean-Pierre. They enjoy drinking fine wine, sampling the best of French cuisine, and roaming the streets of the City of Light. Thrilled with these new friends, Meredith impulsively shares a sheaf of pages she’s written about the Rug and his violent behavior.

There are other quiet moments, too, when the Essex Dogs ride on horseback to their next military engagement, bivouac around the campfire at night, and so on. But make no mistake: Essex Dogs is a novel composed of “action prose”— blunt, feverish, staccato language, and, for long stretches, unremitting. If your taste runs to vividly-depicted violence, Dan Jones is your man.

Michael Hanson, phone in hand, stood looking out the window of his second-story office on Montana and Twelfth Street in Santa Monica. It was an inexpensive suite on an expensive street—just one small room and a secretarial station—but it was a prestigious address and that was important to him. Diane, his secretary, went home early because of a childcare emergency. Ordinarily, Michael would have been annoyed, but somehow aiding Diane in her childcare efforts worked to assuage his considerable guilt regarding his daughter.

Klieg lights installed on the roof of the Foreign Ministry building—itself, a bleak ten-story monolith—beamed down on arriving guests. I fell in with a crowd of cigar-puffing apparatchiks and their brawny wives, all of us moving down a herringbone-parquet hallway into a stately ballroom. The mincing waiter led me to a table in the rear, far from the podium and head table, around which the evening’s festivities would revolve.

A Private Spy, impeccably edited by his late son, Tim Cornwell, includes all the background notes necessary for a clear understanding of Le Carré’s often tumultuous life and times. In letters to friends, lovers, his agent, the press, etc., a writer’s life unfolds for us over the years. For some, the love letters and domestic correspondence will hold less interest than those growing out of a never-ending campaign to go his own way as a novelist, spy or otherwise.