Making the comic novel succeed is a rich, tricky project in our age of desperate, sometimes weirdly eager apocalypticism. Madeline Cash has spotted that a combination of tenderness and satire may be precisely what our times require. Lost Lambs, her debut novel about the Flynn family, is a witty, quickfire book set in a small American town, punch-drunk on clever, skewering lists and infested typographically by the gnats that plague the local church the family attends (“explagnation”, “extermignation”).

The Flynns are in a mess. It was easy for Catherine and Bud to be passionate when he was a young rock star and she was an aspiring artist. But since then they’ve acquired three daughters and a lot of Tupperware. Catherine succumbs to the advances of Jim, an amateur artist who gives her “the youthful comfort of being understood”. He’s rekindled her artistic ambitions, prompting her to decorate the Flynn house with nude self-portraits and proclaim an open marriage. She doesn’t yet know that Jim has a collection of pottery vaginas in his basement (“each of these pussies has touched my life”).

Harper, 13, is a child genius who has taught herself six languages but is “mythically bored” and regularly suspended from school. Louise suffers from the “plight of the middle child”, stuck “in a prison of her own mundanity”. Escape is offered by yourstruly, an online lover who advises her to invest in equipment to make explosives. Finally, there’s 17-year-old Abigail, the family beauty. Too much makeup tells men you’re only interested in one thing, her mother warns. “Good,” Abigail responds. “It saves me the trouble of telling them myself.” Her latest conquest is War Crimes Wes, a former soldier who now works in private security for Paul Alabaster, the town’s megalomaniac billionaire shipping magnate, who also employs Bud in his accounts team.

So here they are, ready to go, in need of a plot – and Cash turns out to be brilliant at plotting, an often underrated art. It’s provided by a combination of church and commerce. Between them, Paul Alabaster and God compete for the Flynns’ souls, with God mediated by Miss Winkle, the local do-gooder who runs the “Lost Lambs” support group that Bud is sent to when he’s too depressed to function at work. One night, a drunken Bud kisses her clumsily as tea splashes from their mugs and they immediately have “wholesome and arousing” sex that turns out to be what Bud needs, more than sex with his hot but dissatisfied wife. Bud now attempts, in the clumsy but ultimately noble manner of the comic hero, to be a better person, and this brings him into conflict with Paul Alabaster.

For ages, Harper – bored enough to go through the Alabaster accounts on the family computer – has been telling Bud that there is a shipping container delivered annually that isn’t properly accounted for on his spreadsheets. Now that Bud is trying to be his best self for Miss Winkle, he asks Alabaster some difficult questions. Meanwhile War Crimes Wes is also investigating Alabaster, worried that Abigail has been marked out as the sole female recipient of an invitation to his next high-security party. And Abigail’s best friend, Tibet, a conspiracy theory addict, has been drawn towards speculation that Alabaster’s yearning for eternal youth has led him into vampiric blood sucking. Of course it’s all going to coalesce around the party itself; of course the conspiracy theorists will turn out to have been right all along; of course the sisters will find that they’re more loyal and more sisterly than they’ve feared.

The priestesses of the book are Miss Winkle and Tibet. Miss Winkle brings an interestingly unfashionable vision of goodness. “Do you want to be right or do you want to be happy?” Bud asks Harper at the start of the book. Then he chose happiness; by the end, Miss Winkle has revealed that there’s no happiness without rightness, and everyone in his increasingly extended family is learning it too. This goodness is complemented by Tibet’s new kinds of truth. She is convinced that if we each experience “only a tiny fraction of reality”, then we have to come up with new models of pooled knowledge. This leads in her case to an odd vindication of online conspiracy theories, but the novel itself offers its own vision of collective truth.

Cash’s virtuosic wit allows her to warm hearts at the same time as satirising the world. The plot may sometimes take up too much of the novel’s air; the typographical gnats may be a little winsome (should that be “wignsome”?); but in an age when the conspiracy theorists do indeed turn out to be disturbingly right as well as disturbingly wrong, and when old-fashioned tenderness and laughter are ever more required, Cash is a happy and energising new voice.

Lara Feigel is the author of Custody: The Secret History of Mothers (William Collins). Lost Lambs by Madeline Cash is published by Doubleday (£16.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

It has all the makings of a classic Val McDermid mystery: a sudden death, a cast of shadowy figures and a tangle of motives buried beneath layers of official secrecy.

But this time, the queen of crime is not inventing a murder, she is revisiting one of history’s most enduring whodunnits – the mysterious death of Christopher Marlowe.

In her new play, And Midnight Never Come, McDermid explores the controversial circumstances around the death of the brilliant and subversive Elizabethan playwright who was stabbed to death in a Deptford tavern at the age of 29. Officially, Marlowe was killed over a row about a bill. Unofficially? Espionage, heresy and a state-sanctioned cover-up are all in the frame.

“This play has been a long time in the making, I started thinking about it more than 40 years ago,” McDermid said. “Over the years, I think I’ve read pretty much everything that’s been written about Marlowe.

“And I think there’s another story lurking in the background here. I’ve got my own theory of what happened. I don’t want to give away spoilers, but I will say that I don’t think Christopher Marlowe was meant to die that day. My conclusion will surprise people, but I think it will also make sense of something people have long found unsatisfactory.”

Researchers widely believe Marlowe worked as an intelligence agent during his lifetime, most likely within the spy network of Sir Francis Walsingham.

In 1587, the young writer was nearly denied his degree from Cambridge amid rumours he had travelled to Catholic seminaries abroad – a potentially treasonous act. But the privy council intervened, saying he had been “employed in matters touching the benefit of his country” and had “done Her Majesty good service”.

It was a combination of Marlowe’s access to sensitive information, his provocative writings and reported atheism, that many believe made him a target to a range of people and groups. When he was killed in May 1593, it was while he was on bail to the privy council for alleged heresy and blasphemy.

The circumstances around his stabbing were highly suspicious – his killer, Ingram Frizer, was pardoned less than a month later and no inquest records survive. Frizer and the two other men present (Nicholas Skeres and Robert Poley) all had links to the Elizabethan secret service.

Some theories suggest the killing was state-sanctioned; others claim Marlowe’s death was faked and that he escaped abroad, possibly continuing to write under a pseudonym (with a fringe theory even naming him as the true author of Shakespeare’s works).

McDermid said she learned there were “a lot of reasons why you might want to get rid of” Marlowe.

“He held a lot of people’s fates in his hands,” she said. “He kept company with many powerful figures in Elizabeth’s court, some of whom were notorious for opinions that sailed close to the wind. In Elizabethan England, a man – or woman – could be executed for opinions that were open to interpretation as heresy.

“For example, Marlowe’s fellow playwright Thomas Kyd, who was also a professional scribe, was arrested and tortured for possessing material the authorities considered heretical, even though he swore he was simply doing a paid job. To get himself off the hook, Kyd claimed he’d been copying Marlowe’s words; an unlikely excuse in respect of a man who had written half a dozen plays and a substantial body of poetry!”

McDermid said the popular version of Marlowe’s death was evidently not true. “For a start it wasn’t a tavern, it was a private house owned by a woman called Eleanor Bull, who was related by marriage to one of Elizabeth’s other spy masters,” she said.

But the writer does not place much stock in the other theories about his death, including that it was a political killing. “I find this unsatisfactory,” she said.

“If his supposed enemies had wanted Marlowe out of the way, they’d have had no need of such an elaborate set-up. He was riding alone daily between Thomas Walsingham’s home in Scadbury to the privy council in Nonsuch Palace to keep the conditions of his bail – a distance of almost 18 miles through rural countryside with dozens of opportunities for an anonymous ambush and assassination.”

She added: “These were not backstreet thugs he was dealing with, they were clever and strategic men of power. It would have been well within their capabilities to get rid of Marlowe and make it look like a street brawl, or knock him out and tip him unconscious into the Thames. There would have been no need to potentially implicate anyone connected with either the Walsingham family or Marlowe’s other powerful connections.”

McDermid has been writing thrillers for more than 30 years, selling more than 19m copies worldwide and winning numerous awards. Script-in-hand readings of And Midnight Never Come will take place at Pitlochry festival theatre and the Edinburgh international book festival on 18and 19 August.

She said the play was framed by Marlowe’s final day, and paid tribute to the late writer’s extravagance.

“Marlowe was a pretty wild guy in lots of respects. He was flamboyant, he was a bit of a jack the lad. He’d get his sword out without much provocation. And he was clearly very sexy,” she said.

About the author

“This book is incredibly important. It explains – better than any book I have ever read – how the prevailing free speech theory from the past century can apply to new technology. Jared Schroeder has engaged in extensive original research, seamlessly weaving these sources in with scholarly commentary and current events that make the issues relevant today.”

—Jeff Kosseff Author of Liar in a Crowded Theater

“Jared Schroeder delivers a timely legal historical work surrounding the marketplace of ideas metaphor at the dawning of the next information age. Expertly researched and written, this important book offers viable solutions for rethinking how we think about communication in our post-truth political ecosystem.”

—Aimee Edmondson, Ohio University

About the authors

“Don’t read this book if you want to learn how to become an influencer. Do read this book if you’re concerned about ‘the self’ being reduced to a mere product circulating on an endless social media reel. As Bollmer and Guinness convincingly demonstrate, influencer culture is only about celebrity and entertainment on the surface. The real story here concerns the reorganization of capital in the 21st century, and this is a story we all need to understand as it is ultimately about how workers who once made products have become products.”

—Kate Eichhorn, The New School

“A dazzling and organic application of cultural theory, The Influencer Factory is a lively and provocative read for anyone invested in understanding how a new, expansive, and important sector of our cultural economy works.”

—Michael Palm, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

“At the intersection of authenticity, identity, and commerce, we find Bollmer and Guinness engaged in next-gen platform capitalism studies. The Influencer Factory nimbly combines digital media theory and political economy, with attention to the labor and infrastructure behind the corporate self.”

—Alexandra Juhasz, Brooklyn College CUNY

“This compelling book gives voice to the often-invisible work of influencers. From the house and car to market and warehouse, The Influencer Factory puts influencers, their work and what they reflect about contemporary media culture into context—historically, socially, and culturally.”

—Larissa Hjorth, RMIT University, Melbourne