It might be the best opening line of a novel this year: “The week I shot a man clean through the head started like any other.”

That’s how Emma Stonex’s “The Sunshine Man” starts. Her followup to “The Lamplighters” alternates between two perspectives. One is the person who’s speaking in that opening line: Birdie, a British woman who’s so focused on her violent plan that she barely pauses to tell us that she has a husband and kids waiting at home. The other is Jimmy, a small-time hood who gets out of jail as the book opens — which we know because Birdie, who believes Jimmy killed her sister, is surveilling him.

“The Sunshine Man,” the title of which refers to a frightening scarecrow in the small town where both Birdie and Jimmy grew up, sounds like a thriller in its description and there a

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