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A To Z - Contemporary Crime & Police Work, Terminology Explained By Ashley Rickman, Published by the New Police Bookshop, £12.95 ISBN: 1 903639 02 6
It's great now and again to be given a book to review, but when I heard that we had a new applicant for membership to the Crime Writers' Association who had written a book on police terms, I wasn't sure this was the one for me. I write medieval stuff, for God's sake, how much good would a modern-day book to translate police lingo? Well, in short, not at all, but that's not the point. The main thing is, I'm a writer. If I ever want to write a modern thriller, I'll need something to tell me how the police talk, what their slang is, and that's what this book gives. It's rare that a dictionary of any sort can amuse and intrigue, but this one was excellent. Rickman has managed to explain things in terms even I can understand (never an easy task) and to make the explanations interesting.
With a book like this, you expect to recognise a few terms. Fine, but you hope that there's several things you don't. I flicked through it and saw 'cyber-terrorism'. That's about people who dream up viruses, I thought. Well, yes. But there's more to it than that, as the examples show. Ok, so I carried on. 'Particulate debris'. I reckoned I could have worked that out. Not 'Foxtrot Oscar' though (a rather rude term about an officer who leaves work early). The true test, though, is to open it at random and see what you find. I did. I got 'slim Jim', 'Smudge' and 'SmartWater' (TM). Nope, I hadn't the faintest idea what they were. You want to know what they are? Buy the book. It's worth the money for any modern-day writer. It's easy to understand, it's bound to hold many words with entirely new meanings for you, and if you're like me, it'll probably give you ideas for new plots and developments as well. It's worth the money.
Mike Jecks
A big boy did it and ran away, Christopher Brookmyre (Little Brown,£9.99pbo)
It is amazing that this novel was written (although not published) before the events of September 11th took place. There are so many similarities in the audacity of the terrorist attacks and their multi-peopled targets that one could almost believe the author to be prescient. However, unlike those real life tragic events in America this novel is extremely funny but through the humour serious points are put across. The egotism of Simon Darcourt, the anti-hero is immense and his tirades against Aberdeen, Aberdonian, certain rock bands, suburbia and four-wheel drive vehicles and their owners are, in fat, well-observed truisms. The real hero, Raymond Ash, with his wife and fretful baby, his mortgage and his teaching job is the antithesis to everything Simon has striven to leave behind him. Until chaos takes over. The construction is neat; the fast action scenes are interspersed with retrospect, going back to student days when Simon and Ray first met and leading up to what caused the rift between them. Each of these flashbacks leads the reader a little closer to an explanation of how the characters of the two main protagonists have been formed. Told from several points of view, the plot revolves around a series of coincidences, perfectly acceptable here. If ray had not still been hooked on computer games he would not have stopped at the airport to buy the latest PC magazine and would not, therefore, have seen Simon Darcourt walking across the concourse. Or thought he had seen him because Simon had been killed when a bomb exploded on a plane three years previously. From that moment everything changes and what happens seems more like one of his most violent computer games rather than real life. Ad had two thirteen year-old boys not been so inquisitive they would not have ended up wreaking havoc on the terrorist's plans, and, had they not been in Ray's English class he would not have been accused of abducting them for nefarious purposes. There is no sloppiness in characterisation, even the bit players are well delineated and are there because they are essential to the storyline. Occasionally the dialogue is in dialect but not enough to irritate nor is it so heavy that it is indecipherable. It is difficult to distinguish whether this is a work of satire or irony but it is certainly worth reading.
Janie Bolitho
A DEATH DIVIDED, Clare Francis (Macmillan £16.99 hbk)
Joe and Jenna were childhood friends. Her parents Alan and Helena Laskey had looked after Joe when his mother died and continued to provide a family environment when Joe's father failed to recover from his wife's death. Now Alan telephones and asks Joe to find Jenna, who had disappeared four years previously. At first, with the help of his girlfriend Sarah, who works for the Crown Prosecution Service, Joe tries all the usual avenues to trace a missing person, but both Jenna and her husband Chetwood have disappeared completely. So drawing a blank with the usual channels, Joe dredges up forgotten friends and tracks down family members who may give him a lead as to Jenna's whereabouts. For Joe, this is more than just helping an old friend, as he admits to himself the guilt he feels for introducing Jenna to Chetwood, because after her marriage she changed. As he seeks Jenna he learns more about Chetwood, but conflicting information that produces more questions than answers. Did Jenna just fail to keep in touch, or is there a more sinister reason that she is cut off from all her family and friends? Struggling with his job at a high-powered law firm, conscious that Sarah is drifting away from him, caring for is taciturn and difficult father, and searching for Jenna, pulls Joe in many directions. The balance of characters was interesting. Much was below the surface, building the suspense. Set just before Christmas, and moving into a snowy winter, this is a haunting book, for as Joe seeks information, the reader receives flashes of insight into Jenna's character, but she remains for the main part veiled, a beautiful ethereal figure that I wanted to discover and kept me turning the pages. A compelling book. Recommended.
Lizzie Hayes.
A DETECTIVE IN LOVE, H.R.F. Keating (Macmillan, £16.99hbk)
Here is the plot: Teenage tennis ace Bubbles Xingara is murdered in her country house. Investigating officer DS Harriet Martens falls, first in lust and then in love with a colleague. That's about it. The suspects - who appear and are dismissed sequentially, so as not to confuse matters - include passing tramp, French gangster (who thankfully remains off-page), retired games mistress and Greek tennis coach. A brief, pointless excursion to the States produces a FBI agent whose role almost solely consists of saying, "call me Chuck." Throughout, stilted dialogue reinforces the am-dram atmosphere: "Old Eros may very well be at the root of your current case," Martens' husband remarks. "This," he explains, "is just another way of looking at my theory of the ubiquity of the sexual impulse. " (Try saying that aloud.) Elsewhere, a policeman notes that the victim was "too busy " to have any what they call social life, the 'they' in this case presumably being the English-speaking world. Despite the welding on of the occasional "gritty" detail - the victim's shorts are faeces-stained; people say "fuck" - all this takes place in the crime genre's drawing room, which isn't necessarily a bad place to be, provided it's been designed in three dimensions. This hasn't. Page after page of wearisome repetition masquerades as development of theme: one more reference to "dread Eros" and I'd have run amok with a javelin myself. There is never much evidence that the detectives care who killed Bubbles, and that was the only area in which I felt any empathy with them. Reginald Hill and Len Deighton - fine novelists both - supply admiring cover copy, so maybe all this is a matter of taste. But a false-confessor is weeded out after having claimed to have "waded across the river" to commit murder when it actually contained "little more [water] than would float a paper boat". Later, we learn that the real killer escaped in a canoe. Keating is the recipient of the CWA Cartier Diamond Dagger. On this showing, he should give it back.
Mick Herron
A FINE AND PRIVATE PLACE, Freda Davies (Constable £16.99hbk)
Freda Davies' latest novel is set in the period where Fred and Rose West's victims were being uncovered in nearby Gloucester: a grim reminder that events of lesser magnitude may be ignores in the light of current catastrophes. The setting here is the environs of the Forest of Dean, specifically a relatively unspoiled village that retains vestiges of feudalism. The cast is traditional with modern refinements: the squire being old money but his wife a snob with no sense of noblesse oblige. New money, on the other hand, is represented by a jolly widow, formerly a madam. There is the vicar and his wife, a retired and racist Army officer, a witch, a mentally challenged youth, old ladies who were once servants and Land Girls, and, of course, the police. D.I. Tyrell is Davies' serial character, a neat investigator offset by a superior whose rudeness beggars belief because he can't come to terms with Tyrell's standing to inherit wealth, land and a baronetcy. But even he is eclipsed by a sergeant: a scumbag of the type that wastes street kids in Rio. The event that brings the CID to a quiet backwater is the unearthing of the remains of an American GI when a drainage ditch is dug on the squire's land. Identified by his dog-tags, the soldier disappeared just before D-Day 50 years ago and was posted as a deserter. Reactions to his reappearance are predictable in a community where the old ladies were nubile girls half a century ago and farm labourers and others had their noses put out of joint by glamorous foreign soldiery. The village closes in on itself. However, Tyrell finds an ally in one old woman by agreeing to look into the disturbance of her late husband's grave which seems higher than it should be. Exhumation is the price Tyrell pays for the widow's gossip on affairs of 50 years ago, and exhumation reveals another body in the grave where there should have been only one. This one is also recent but naked, swarthy, not identifiable. The face is battered out of recognition - and who but a woman writer would have thought of relating a cheese grater to finger prints? There has to be a connection between the two murders. Did the second victim know who killed the first? Or was the second victim the first killer - which would solve two murders? At this point the obnoxious DCI arrives trailing the sadistic sergeant, and Tyrell has them to contend with in addition to a plethora of suspects with secrets dating back to old wars, to pornography and procurement: secrets that people would - and do - kill to protect. Another cosy then, but for every fan of roman noir there's one for the picturesque English village (which exists): a place where, if screams are less likely to be heard than from tenements or city wastelands, it's not because murders are fewer but because village walls tend to be thicker, muffling the screams.
Gwen Moffat
A FINER END Deborah Crombie, (Macmillan £16.99)
Quite simply, a stunning read. Crombie combines strong characterisation, plot and pace with a devilish story about the supernatural, the search for the Grail and modern-day murder. When Jack Montford's seemingly perfect life is interrupted by messages from beyond, a strange group of people, including his girlfriend, Winnie the vicar, meet up and try to understand what the long-dead monk is telling them. Glastonbury is about to reach another darkest hour and only blood will satisfy the Old Ones, the dark power which ruled Glastonbury long before Christianity arrived at its shores but whose blood is spilt is revealed with perfect timing. This is a must-read book by a top-rate author. Ignore it at your peril! Fiona Shoop
A SIMPLE DEATH Carolyn Morwood, (The Women's Press £6.99)
Who is the dead man found murdered in the park? Still recovering from her aunt's murder, Marlo Shaw, professional cricketer and something to do with property deeds (you probably have to read the first book of the series to know exactly what she does do) is shaken by a second murder. But when her friend, Harold becomes involved, she has no choice but to investigate, placing her own life in danger. What she discovers is enough to rip another family apart but is she strong enough to face it? There are too many gaps in this book with Morwood assuming that the reader has read the previous book - or that might just be an assumption. We are expected to have a solid knowledge of the major players' background, which is annoying, and Marlo doesn't come into her own until around page 90. And then it all changes. Ignore the tediously slow part of the book and concentrate on its later passages where the pace and characterisation are fully developed and we finally get a sense of who Marlo is and the extent of her pain. Well worth reading if you can stick at it with a good ending exhibiting the darkness behind even the lightest people.
Fiona Shoop
A SPY'S LIFE Henry Porter, (Orion, £12.99hbk)
With the collapse of the Berlin Wall it was argued that the spy novel would fade away. Yet the genre thrives. The Russians may now be our friends and the enemies rather less obvious, but writers are still chronicling the charmless world of espionage. The latest to have a go is the respected journalist Henry Porter who in this novel describes what happens when a former British spy Bobby Harland's plane crashes in the East River, while returning to his job at the United Nations. Here the enemy is not the Russkies but an Eastern European mafia warlord who married Harland's former Czech girlfriend. As is now customary in novels of this kind there is a rather clichéd sub-plot involving technology - here Harland's son by his girlfriend is baffling the security services of the world by encrypting secret photographs and sending them over the internet. First the good news - as you'd expect the book is certainly competently written, although I doubt, as the sticker on the dust jacket suggests you would 'Be Gripped for Only £12.99'. I think the problem lies with the genre. Any book written for the discerning public (rather than the pot-boiler end of the market) automatically leads to a comparison with John Le Carré, and few novelists are as good as Le Carré at his best. Porter certainly isn't - although he makes a very good stab at inheriting the crown. The other difficulty is making the plot believable. I wasn't convinced by the use supposedly played by the internet. In addition the author got himself confused. Much was made in the early chapters of Harland's mission from the UN to investigate why his plane crashed - yet this was conveniently forgotten in the second half of the book, when the story became much more a traditional contest between good (Harland) and evil (the warlord and his British Secret Service sidekick). Well I got confused, baffled and frankly a little bored.
Simon Fowler
ABOVE SUSPICION Frank Lean, (William Heinnemann, £17.99hbk)
The brother of a David Beckham-like Manchester United footballer employs Dave Cunane, one of city's top P.I.s to hunt down the kidnappers of his baby daughter. But all is not as it may seen. Actually nobody is as they seem - there are more twists and turns in this very satisfactory thriller than in a quick dribble up the pitch at Old Trafford. Unfortunately you might know this from the first twenty or so pages which are truly dreadful. And there are several minor cribs from the American hardboiled genre which also grate. However this is more than made up by some excellent characterisations. They all seem to be very real people, especially his friend the giant, Cliff, and his partner the long-suffering Janine. Even the baddies are well-drawn. There is also a real sense of presence, particularly the brooding escarpment of Alderley Edge and the edginess of central Manchester. And of course the plot is satisfactorily convoluted and it is almost believable - a rare feat. Fortunately he keeps the football side to the minimum, most of the book involves drug dealers and gamblers. All in all this is very well worth read, whether you support the Reds or not.
Simon Fowler
AFTERMATH Peter Robinson, (Macmillan £10.00)
It's generally best not to judge a book by its cover but Macmillan are not boasting when they hail Robinson as 'Darker than Jeffrey Deaver' and 'Grittier than Ian Rankin'. Aftermath is his best book yet. Centred around child-abuse, it is not the normal 'meet the paedophiles' novel. It is much darker than that. People can never escape their past and when their past is one of the most unimaginable abuse, is it any wonder that they choose a partner who abuses them? When two police officers discover the battered form of Lucy Payne, they have no idea just what lies beyond her unconscious body. They have no idea that the mysterious disappearance of young girls is about to be solved - or that their lives are about to be changed. Irrevocably. Not only is the plot gripping but so is the pain which ensnares all of the characters is this first-rate novel. Each new discovery is more startling than the last until an almost unbelievable conclusion which, sadly, is all too believable and amongst the darkest ever written. This is the must-buy Christmas novel by an author who deserves to be ranked among the best crime writers of this generation - and possibly beyond.
Fiona Shoop
ALL FAMILIES ARE PSYCHOTIC, Douglas Copeland (Flamingo, £9.99tpbk)
Douglas Copeland has the reputation of a writer who has tapped into a generation with his ability to capture modern life and the implications of technology, media, and hype on society. This ability is exactly why this novel fails to grip the reader and take them on a fast, furious and fantastic ride into the failings of the American family unit. I could not help but feel that this book was written with a deliberate thought of a surveyed and classified audience in mind. Taking a step away from his technology driven observations and cultural criticism of his past novels, Copeland delves not only into the defunct American family structure preached to a global audience through US television and film, but he also appeases his social conscience with a representation of AIDS as a literal social disease facing Western Civilisation, but also uses it as a metaphorical expression of unchecked excessive coming back to haunt you. However, the Drummond family, especially Janet, are fun characters, well rounded and great companions for the reader's journey. These characters, with a nicely placed slice of Britain's Royal family sown into the plot, are one of the highlights of the book. As a reader you come to care about what happens to Janet and even her disreputable ex-husband Ted, as the products of their union make even more of a mess of their own lives as their parents did bringing them up. All Families are Psychotic starts at Cape Canaveral the site of USA's past NASA glories, the embodiment of a failed American dream that has seeped into the surrounding suburbs and cities of the Florida state. Copeland is a good writer with flashes of brilliant social criticism and interwoven themes and metaphors, however the wackiness of the characters and situations feel a bit forced and although the novel eventually gets the reader to the hyper suspension of disbelief needed to accept the ending presented. The warped modern fairy tale, where the councelling adage of siting down and talking through your problems as a family - overcomes the lifetime of typical family life with all its hurts, non-communication and petty resentments is a bit of a let down.
Christine Campbell
ANGELS & DEMONS, Dan brown (Corgi £5.99 )
I really shouldn't have been asked to review this book as, if there's one kind of thriller I can't get my head around it's those that feature ancient secret brotherhoods. Angels & Demons does. Another kind are those that concern the priesthood. Angels & Demons does. A third kind is where there is little white on the page. Angels & Demons is that kind of book. I tried to start it at least three times but failed to get past the first few chapters. That doesn't mean this is a bad book, just not my kind of thing.
Mark Timlin
THE ANGLO-IRISH MURDERS Ruth Dudley Edwards (Harper Collins £6.99)
When the British and Irish governments decide to hold a conference intended to resolve some of the sensitive cultural issues in Anglo-Irish relations, Baroness (Jack) Troutbeck seems an unlikely choice as chairwoman. Until one recalls her late night drinking session at the Lords with a visiting Irish delegation, when she waxed lyrical about her excursions to the emerald isle when she was a girl. And so her friend, Robert Amiss finds himself organising the conference. Gathered together in a pink monstrosity masquerading as Moycoole Castle are the republications, nicknamed 'MOPE' 'Most Oppressed People Ever' their loyalist equivalents, nicknamed DUPE, 'Downtrodden Unionists for Parity Esteem'. Also present, delegates from Wales, and Kelly-Mae O'Hara from America representing the American Catholics, plus a Japanese Irish studies specialist to observe and record the event. All in all a mixed bag. I have not encountered Baroness Troutbeck before, but I loved her immediately, and feel strongly that if she had chaired some of the conferences I have attended, they would have benefited greatly from her wit and wisdom, particularly the latter when she continually cuts short the speeches in order to head for the bar. Also most worthy of mention is the waitress Philomena, whose firm grasp on the essentials was something to behold. In a few words of dialogue Philomena materialised before me. I wouldn't like to cross her, but I'd like her on my side. Even before the conference has begun several people have dropped out and the numbers are considerably reduced, but they are soon to be reduced even further, as one by one the delegates start to meet with fatal accidents. A wonderful piece of satire, but one which I may have appreciated more had I a firm grasp on Irish politics, but on reflection, maybe the book illustrates that no one really has a firm grasp on Irish politics. Sparkling dialogue, I started to put post-it notes on the pages with passages of particular brilliance and then found I had as many post-it notes as pages. Highly recommended.
ANIMOSITY, David Lindsey (Little,Brown £10.99hbk)
The dual locations of this novel, Paris and Texas are both described vividly. You can almost feel the Texan heat and picture the Parisian streets. For a novel consisting of over 300 pages it is remarkable that it revolves around only five characters, each of whom is complex, interesting and believable and has a hidden agenda of their own. It is not until half-way through the book that the murder takes place yet from the start there is a tension which gradually builds up to the horrific killing and its aftermath. From then onwards come more and more revelations which, one after the other, turn out to be lies. Ross Marteau, the protagonist, is a renowned sculptor. The violent break up of his latest affair coincides with the end of a year-long commission in Paris. Ross returns to his home in Texas where he is approached by Celeste Lacan, a newcomer to the area, a beautiful and intriguing woman. She wants him to sculpt her younger sister, Leda, who is even more beautiful facially although her body is deformed. He is fascinated by the challenge and agrees to take on the commission but as he works he falls in love with Celeste. He own obsession with the women are matched by those of Celeste and Leda, but theirs relate to events which took place twenty-five years ago. Unaware that he is being manipulated he is drawn further into their world until it is impossible to extricate himself. The unexpected and shocking ending lends the novel perfect symmetry. David Lindsey writes in a flowing narrative style but it is the plentiful dialogue through which the plot unfolds, the lines of the characters revealing a little more of themselves and their obsessions during each conversation. This is a novel of lies and deceptions, of love and heartache and finally of death and revenge.
Janie Bolitho
Bad Timing, Molly Brown, Big Engine £8.99
That sassy lassy Molly Brown presents us with that rarest of birds, a collection of short stories. Personally, I adore these, finding them easy to dip into when one has a few spare minutes to read and simply hasn't the energy to get involved with a magnum opus, and this anthology most certainly didn't change my opinion. The first story, Bad Timing, which has been optioned for a film, is probably my favourite; a quixotic look at time travel going wrong, with hilarious and often touching results. And speaking of time travel, every story in this collection has an odd theme to it, in fact there is a slightly sinister element about each and every one of them. This is not your collection of bright and brittle yarns but a walk on the dark side. Yet it is compulsive reading and I would happily recommend it to readers who enjoy the bizarre, the weird and the way-out. One last thing. Every title in this book has the uncanny ability to make you think, even if what you think about tends to keep you awake at night. So don't miss this opportunity to chill your spine and enjoy a book that you can dip in and out of at random.
Deryn Lake
The Best American Mystery Stories, 2001, edited by Lawrence Block and Otto Penzler. Houghton Mifflin $27.50.
Anthologies of short crime fiction stories all too frequently leave me cold. Frankly, it strikes me as a waste of time to pen short stories when you could be more profitably devoted to writing the long ones. But if anyone could teach me the error of those thoughts, it would probably be Messrs Block and Penzler, and the 20 authors who contribute to this impressive collection.
These are the 20 best mystery stories selected by Laurence Block and Otto Penzler, and aside from Jeremiah Healy, Bill Pronzini and Peter Robinson (a Yorkshireman who presumably qualifies as American on a residency basis) the authors are all entirely new to me. But what all the contributors do remarkably well is to substantiate a case for the short story as self enclosed entities, satisfying in their compactness and certainly not long stories which never reached fruition. More than that many of the contributions offer totally original perspectives on the crime fiction story, even if they are sometimes short in mystery.
The styles of the stories vary enormously, and surprisingly I found myself more satisfied by those which take a naturalistic, almost factional approach to their subject matter. Michael Downs's Prison Food is an account of a prison caterer who has dedicated much effort to improving the diet of the inmates only to find herself with the onerous task of preparing the last meal of a killer due to be executed. The account becomes all the more poignant because the woman can see in the killer some of the negatives traits she sees emerging in her son. Then there's Jennifer Anderson's almost sociological study of a female police rookie as she tries to learn the ropes, win the approval of her males colleagues, and solve a few crimes along the way. William Gay's episode focuses on a child who disappears in an instant, and the impact on her parents and the local community.
But if what you want is more of the good old traditional crime fiction, that too is well represented here. Jeremiah Healy offers another welcome outing for Irish Bostonian PI, John Cuddy. A Book Of Kells has Cuddy searching for a facsimile copy of a precious Irish illuminated manuscript which has disappeared from the locked cabinet of one of Boston's Irish institutes. Steve Hockensmith's Erie's Last Day reminds me of those back and white b crime movies of the mid-1950's. It recounts the last day's employment of a police detective as he tries to solve one more murder before he settles down to an unwanted retirement. Retirement is no option for Pronzini's wonderful nameless detective. After all these year's he's still chasing down the cases, this time an extortion case which isn't quite what it seems. And don't be fooled into thinking the stories I have not mentioned, don't warrant your closer examination. There isn't one story in this collection which doesn't repay the effort of a read. Would that all short story anthologies were as good.
Bob Cartwright
BITTER END, Joyce Holms (Headline, £17.99hbk)
Shakespeare and Dickens are allowed to indicate their characters' personalities by giving them appropriate names, aren't they? Dogberry, Squeers - we get the message. But are modern crime writers? Fizz? Well, the part-time law-student cum office dogsbody is an insecure, hyperactive extravert, so fizz she does. She's certainly won over her sobersides boss, Tam Buchanan, attracting dishy insurance investigator Giles Cambridge (but are his intentions honourable?), irascible lawyer Lawrence Crassick and a number of other susceptible old gents en route. Even a token Asian lad too. Oh, and she and her hair (why doesn't she cut off the damn' ringlets?) solve a complex crime in such a way that the status quo is smoothly maintained, despite hair-raising attempts to ruffle it. Joyce Holms is a dab hand at depicting cats, and does people well too. But I'd be dead worried if she got a day-job filling camping gas cylinders (with North Sea Gas, for goodness' sake?) This gripe apart, Holms' jolly Scots romp would cheer a miserable evening or sit well in a beach bag. Judith Culter
BITTERROOT, James Lee Burke (Orion £12.99hbk)
Does anyone who reads crime novels really need James Lee Burke recommended? Those of you who know him will automatically buy this one; those who haven't - go get it now! Do it, don't bother reading this review, just go get it. You'll enjoy it, like all of his books (and don't stop at the crime stuff...All of them, you hear me? Now!) This one is another Billy Bob Holland story, set in Montana rather than the more familiar Louisiana territory of the Dave Robicheaux novels, but James Lee brings to it all the glorious talent he's delivered to everything he writes. This guy has a way with plot and description that makes you want to live where he is. Indeed, I think he should do a travelogue about America, that we'd read and want to go live there; but meanwhile just enjoy his crime books. And this one is terrific. Billy Bob (ex-Texas Ranger, now a lawyer and feeling guilty about the accidental shooting of his partner, L.Q.Navarro) heads up to the Bitterroot valley in Montana to holiday with his old friend Doc Voss, who's a Vietnam Veteran (Special Services, etc) turned environmental activist. Montana, it seems is populated by weirdoes: violent bikers, white supremacists, alcoholic authors, the Mafia, and sexy women. So when Doc's daughter gets gang-raped and the suspected perpetrator ends up burned to death, Doc is accused. Step in Billy Bob in defence of Doc, even though he's not quite sure Doc didn't do it. But Billy Bob's a Texas man, so he stand by his friends and ends up in a maelstrom of suspicions...Was it Doc? Or the Mafia? Or the author? Or the woman? Or the bi-sexual the biker was buggering? This book will grab you and leave you wondering right up to the end. Which is where (apart from some other minor complaints) I find some reservations. Don't get me wrong: I love James Lee Burke; I think he's a great writer in the tradition of Hemingway and Steinbeck. He's an American writer, and like Hemingway, flawed. He delivers superb novels, from his early successes like Half of Paradise, Lay Down My Shield and Sword through to The Lost Get-Back Boogie, and all of those are good to the point of wonderful. James Lee Burke is a GREAT writer who seems to have hit on a formula that works for the most of the book but then, in this one at least, comes together too fast. It's like he worked up this great, complicated plot involving just about every factional group in Montana, and then had them all wipe out one another so Billy Bob can go home to Texas with a clear conscience, even though he did (reverting to his old Texas Ranger days) try to shoot one of the villains. If I have any doubts about James Lee Burke they are in that area: he proposes hard men, willing to do what a man's gotta do, even if it means shooting someone. But his heroes are always still good guys. They care about family and friends, but are still willing to pick up the old Colt. 45 they hoped to have left behind and use it to blow someone away. OK, there's nothing new in the flawed hero, but JLB tends to use that a tad too much, and - as much as I enjoyed this book (and I did, because most of it is brilliant) - I found a little too much of the metaphysical stuff that Burke uses. Billy Bob has regular conversations with the ghost of L.Q.Navarro, which appears to him, usually fondling or twirling the Colt. 45 Billy Bob inherited. Stuff like that: whenever Billy Bob suffers a crisis of conscience, L.Q. Navaro appears in ghostly form to advise, or clear Billy Bob's conscience. I wish JLB would stop doing that: if a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do - do it, and forget the ghostly justifications.
Otherwise: brilliant.
Angus Wells
THE BLOOD TREE - Paul Johnston, (New English Library, £5.99)
Is there someone out there who hasn't read a Paul Johnston yet? If you haven't, this is the fourth in the quirky Quintilian Dalrymple series by the excellent Johnston, and it doesn't disappoint in any way - and you should buy a copy now. This story starts in the city state of Edinburgh in 2026, some years since the Platonic republic has been created in the aftermath of the disastrous drugs gang wars which broke up the UK. America has ceased to exist, as has Europe - in fact it's hard to see what exactly remains of the world as we know it. So, we have Independent Edinburgh as a tourist's paradise. The people who live there are downtrodden, pretty much in a 1984 vision of the future, but with the bureaucracy come infinite opportunities for a stroppy character like Quint to make his points. And he does so with venom, but a sympathy that makes you enjoy his sardonic observations. At the beginning of the story Quint chats to three men working on the road late at night, but then he's distracted by the lights of City Guard vehicles hurrying to a robbery. In 2026, gangs of children as young as five are running wild. And then Quint's father has a heart attack when Quint is visiting him. It's while Quint's in hospital waiting to hear how his old man is, that he receives the summons back to the roadworks. They weren't City workers after all: they were thieves - but what sort of thief would want to break into a sealed wing of the City's archives from the days of the Scottish Parliament? And what was the importance of the solitary document they removed? The pace of the story is well-constructed and superbly paced, like Paul's other books, and very difficult to put down. In this one, Paul has split the action between the two cities of Edinburgh and Glasgow, the democratic republic next door. As usual the dialogue is caustic, usually witty and ironic, but that's not Paul's main skill as far as I'm concerned. For me it's the sheer breadth of his imagination and his ability to bring to life a shabby, run-down, existence, in which the state has all power and the individual has to fight for any form of independence or to protect individuality. His vision is not pleasant - indeed it's often deeply unsettling - but perhaps that's important too, at a time when our government can consider detention without trial or appeal because of an attack on another country. Maybe Paul's vision isn't so far wide of the mark.
BUBBLES UNBOUND - Sarah Strohmeyer (Headline £10.00hbk)
Bubbles Yablonksy is what is known as a "blonde bimbo" with a weakness for handsome men. She is also the premier hairdresser at Sandy's House of Beauty. Fed up of hairdressing, Bubbles decides to shed her blonde bimbo image and get an education. She decides on a career in journalism and manages to get a job that includes on the job training at her local newspaper. If that isn't stressful enough she also has to deal with her extremely wacky family. These include Jane her precocious teenage daughter, Lulu her gun-toting, shoplifting mother and Dan her social-climbing ex-husband. Instead of getting her dream assignment bubbles finds herself in the middle of a nasty murder and a massive lawsuit. Unsurprisingly, help comes in the form of sexy, but elusive AP photographer Stiletto. (With a name like that you can't but help think of high-heeled shoes!). No doubt there will be a number of comparisons to the Stephanie Plum series. But since Janet Evanovich was her mentor it is not surprising. Even the blurb on the front cover of the book declares it to be "in the fabulous tradition of Janet Evanovich". While Bubbles Unbound is reminiscent of the Stephanie Plum series to a certain extent it is also very different. One main difference is that it is much faster. No doubt this is what inspired the title. It contains non-stop action, humour and unconventional characters. However as far as I am concerned there is only three words that can describe this book and that is "Over-the-top". I think that my major objection to this book is that it is trying to be a hyperactive version of the Stephanie Plum series and it doesn't work. Bubbles Yablonksy comes across as being too fluffy and dizzy. I found the plotting very thin, the characters totally unbelievable and her relationship with Stiletto extremely ridiculous. Even the bonus of peppering the book with beauty recipes is not much help. I also found this book to be very irritating even for a book containing a ditzy and impulsive blonde. I quickly got bored with the implausible characters and the unconvincing plot line. I would not be surprised if this book has garnered a lot of fans especially amongst the readers of the Stephanie Plum series. But I am certainly not one of them. Having heard so much about this book I was sorely disappointed. I am not sure whether I would go out of my way to read the next one in the series (if there is one). This book had no depth whatsoever. A big disappointment and letdown.
Ayo Onatade
CHANGELINGS Jo Bannister (Pan £5.99pbk)
Detective Inspector Liz Graham has a nasty case to deal with. Somebody is blackmailing the town. First a tub of yoghurt is found with a note on it saying 'this could have been botulism.' Later, the showers at a school have red jelly coming out of them, and a note is found, 'This could have been acid.' Nobody has been hurt so far and the blackmailer demands £1m. When his demands are not met, he steps things up, and baby lotion is adulterated with caustic soda, and a young mother's hands are burned. They're plenty of suspects-- a whole town in fact. Worse, she doesn't have Sergeant Donovan to help her. Instead she finds herself saddled with an American troubleshooter employed by the supermarket chain. Donovan's on sick leave, or at least so everyone thinks. The truth is he is very sick and has been taken on by local villagers who nurse him back to health. But as he spends time with them his innocent questions endanger his life. There is something wrong, very wrong, and the secrets of the past threaten Donovan and an innocent young girl. Jo Bannister is an excellent storyteller, and it is a shame that she hasn't had the success she deserves. With luck some television producer will pick her up, and give her books the exposure they deserve.
COMPULSION, Gill Paul (Hodder & Stoughton £17.99hbk)
Should I say it? Would it be too trite and obvious? Well, sometimes trite and obvious is the way to go. The problem with Compulsion is that it is hardly compulsive. There seems little compulsion in the life of heroine Nicola Drew. A doctor with an off putting talent for telling which of her patients is about to die, is preparing to join her exotic and passionate lover Sedic in flying to his Indonesian homeland when he uses the novel method of a humiliating art exhibition to announce that she is dumped. Nicola flies to Jakarta on her own where Sedic's shady father has wangled her a job in a hospital. She discovers the Indonesians are being sold substandard medical equipment, takes up with a new love against a background of political unrest and her ex-lover reappears in her life and still it is all rather uninvolving. There is a murder, there is a conspiracy and there is a resolution, but all this drama takes place off-stage leaving a rather uncompelling shard of what could have made for a rather gripping yarn. At the end of the novel Nicola's talent for divination reappears as she magically realises she is pregnant for a happy-ever-after ending. This is probably Women's Own readers' idea of a thriller. Me, I had to go read some Martyn Waites to get the saccharine out of my mouth.
Calum Macleod
DARK, Kenji Jasper (No Exit Press, £7.99pbk)
Kenji Jasper is a twenty-five year old writer and journalist who now lives in Brooklyn, New York. This first novel tells the story of 19 year old Thai Williams, a filing clerk in the DC department of public works, from the time when he walks in on his girl friend, Sierra involved in inappropriate behaviour with a guy called Nick. Thai shoots Nick in the head and goes on the run to Charlotte in North Carolina and what follows is the process whereby Thai comes to terms with his Manifest Destiny. To do this he has to measure the worth of his boyhood friends back in the 'hood with a whole host of 'new' people in Charlotte. He has to confront his relationship with his father and discover family secrets about his mother. Dark is a short novel but it goes on working for a time after you've finished it. It makes you think about poverty and class and abortion and race and youth and the problem of guns in American society. It makes you think, as well, about how a ghetto mentality works to knit its inhabitants tightly inside the fabric of its own limited existence and how difficult it is to break away from. The book doesn't always work and occasionally teeters on the edge of sentimentality. But several times in the reading of this novel I experienced myself inside the head of a young, confused, intelligent and struggling nineteen year-old black man; a place I have never been before. For that alone this novel deserves to be read. But there's a story in there as well, people rather than characters, and a note of hope and optimism about the reserves of the human spirit that world politics sometimes erases from our consciousness.
John Baker
DEAD SLEEP - Greg Iles (Hodder and Stoughton, £10.00tpb)
"I stopped shooting people six months ago, just after I won the Pulitzer Prize". I guessed Jordan Glass's occupation straight away, though it wasn't long before she admitted what she was. On her travels, in an art gallery in Hong Kong, Jordan causes a stir; and pushing through the crowds she discovers the cause. The sleeping nude woman in the portrait could be her. The crowds of Chinese men who surround her cannot believe that a model of someone who looks so dead on canvas can be actually living and in the hall with them. No wonder they riot. Jordan races back to New York to trace the source of these rare works, anxious to know how someone with her features can appear and more anxious to learn more as she discovers that the gossip is that this is one of a series now appearing in which all the models are not sleeping but assumed to be dead. Painted not from the life, but in the afterlife by some ghoul, who also makes a cool half a million bucks on each canvas. Readers who picked up the value of a fashionable portrait today will also have thought that the dealer handles those works is also in line for a nice little commission. He is Jordan's first stop. Unfortunately for him, Jordan is also his last possible trade. Within a few minutes of their meeting Christopher Wingate is dead and his gallery is in flames. The man following Jordan could make things very bad for her as she escapes alone. Special Agent John Kaiser, when he reveals himself, though, knows - as Jordan herself does - how her features could appear on that painting, though she has not slept for an artist nor died. Jordan has a missing identical twin, like all the possible models kidnapped in her home city of New Orleans. And then everything changes - slows down - though we are only two-fifths of the way into the book. After all, there can't be that many world class artists living in New Orleans. Those who do live there, though, are an odd bunch and manage to give the police and FBI a run for their money. It is Jordan who recounts this story, so Greg Iles has had to do what Ian Fleming did in The Spy Who Loved Me, give himself a female voice. As the FBI start to meet the suspects they begin to use their profiling skills, identifying how these artists are hiding their psychopathic personae. Greg Iles wears Jordan's characters as easily as his murderer hides his true self, and probably with more scientific accuracy.
Les Hurst
DEAD WEIGHT - John Francome (Headline, £10)
As many thrills or your money back. That's how Headline are pushing Francome's latest, and it's not hard to see why: his hero is champion jockey Phil Nicholas, wondering if he's lost his nerve after a bad fall, while all around him stalwarts of the racing game are being picked off by psycho-loser Keith Jeffries, outraged by what he sees as flagrant cheating by jockeys, trainers and just about everybody else. As punishment beatings escalate to kidnapping and murder, Nicholas is drawn into the attempt to end Jeffries' equine terrorism, and in so doing gets to discover whether his courage has gone for good. Natural, then, to market Francome, a former jockey himself, as the new Francis, but it's not necessarily doing him any favours. A straightforward imitator would put Nicholas centre-stage, with a first-person account of his personal demons; Francome's net is cast wider, with a reasonably large cast of characters, most allowed room to move and breathe - the overweight journo fretting about his dress-sense; the bereaved cop who hides upstairs when the merry widow next door comes calling. The villain's a little by-the-numbers - down to the obligatory appalling-childhood scene - but there's some interesting entanglements otherwise: the hero's seeing a shrink on the side (bit of a no-no in this macho world, apparently) and his number two jockey's eyeing both his champion status and his new bride a little too keenly. This is entertaining stuff, while the racing itself is described curiously flatly (though sixteen novels in, this maybe isn't surprising - there's only so much you can do, surely, in describing a load of horses chasing each other round a field?). Four legs so-so, then; two legs better. And since puns are compulsory when reviewing horse-racing thrillers: this one comes from good stock, and provides an enjoyable canter.
Mick Herron
DEATH OF KINGS - Philip Gooden, (ContableRobinson £6.99)
It is 1601 and Nick Revill, a young actor from the Chamberlain's Men - i.e. Shakespeare's company at the Globe - is kidnapped late at night in London, blindfolded and eventually delivered into the presence of Sir Robert Cecil, the sinister, hunchbacked Secretary to the Council. He is warned that pressure will soon be put on the Chamberlain's Men to put on a special performance of Richard II. This play has political implications, as the ageing Queen Elizabeth has refused to announce who her heir will be, and there are rumours of a possible uprising by the Earl of Essex, Elizabeth's erstwhile favourite, who has now blotted his copybook in Ireland. Nick is to be Cecil's eyes and ears in the Chamberlain's Men - an offer he cannot refuse. The reluctant Nick is dragged into a web of treachery and deceit, most of the time not understanding at all what is going on. He is led into all sorts of dangerous situations, and eventually into Essex House in the Strand, where the Earl rules a court of nobles and villains. Her, at the request of his boss, William Shakespeare, he delivers a poetic message to the Earl of Southampton, an ally of Essex, and a close friend of the playwright. The performance of Richard II takes place, the audience consisting in the main of Essex supporters, who react in an unruly and terrifying way. This is shortly followed by the abortive Essex rebellion, of which Nick is an unwilling spectator, having been sent on yet another mysterious mission to Essex House (not by Shakespeare this time, but the shadowy Nemo, whom Nick assumes to be his go-between to Cecil). At about the same time, two apparently motiveless murders take place in Nick's unsavoury abode at Southwark. After a private audience with the Queen on the eve of Essex's execution, Nick himself escapes death and most of the pieces of the jigsaw fall into place. The writing is good and presents a vivid picture of late Elizabethan London. Convincing portraits are presented of characters great and humble, from Elizabeth, Essex, Cecil, the Earl of Southampton, Shakespeare, down to green young actors. Nick's prostitute girlfriend, and the three weird sisters who own his disreputable rented accommodation. Needless to say, all lovers of Shakespeare with recognise many in-jokes and literary allusions. I don't find Nick particularly likeable - he is a rather passive hero, and rarely acts on his own initiative. The true allegiance of many of the characters remains a mystery at the end, no doubt intentionally, and I am sure future entanglements lie in wait for Nick.
Maureen Carlyle
DEEP FREEZE - Patricia Hall (Alison and Busby, £17.99hbk)
Continuing Patricia Hall's gritty series featuring uneasy lovers DCI Michael Thackeray and investigative journalist Laura Ackroyd Deep Freeze is a very good novel, with strong, sympathetic characters and dense, taut plotting. It deals uncompromisingly with twenty-first century issues: genetic manipulation, social misfits and stressed police officers. The main plot revolves round a Yorkshire hospital specialising in "women's troubles" - it treats women desperate to conceive, and women wishing equally desperately that they hadn't. While many - including its leading gynaecologist and obstetrician, Stephen Fenton-Green - see it as a place of miracles, it attracts the attention of the religious far-right, pro-lifers so opposed to abortion and foetal experimentation that they might be prepared to kill to prevent them. Then a gypsy teenager suspected of having had an illegally late abortion is shot dead on the hospital steps. But is she the real target? DCI Thackeray leads the enquiry. As a Catholic who lost his own child in terrible circumstances, he brings his own baggage with him, as do key members of his team. And as does his partner, Laura. Like Thackeray, she is forced to investigate matters which give her personal pain. Like him, she persists. As a journalist, she can make contacts the police would find difficult: this time, she finds it increasingly hard to feed back information to Thackeray. The sub-plot involves a gypsy family living on the fringes of a sink estate. Impotent and vengeful when their cherished sister is shot, they endure more and more persecution until the reader waits for one of them to crack under the pressure. Meanwhile the police search desperately for any sort of lead. Their suspects include known criminals and a visiting American evangelist. The tensions build, those in the local CID exacerbated by the arrival of a cocky cop, determined to earn brownie points at their expense. Alcoholism, depression, and sexual dysfunction take their toll. Thackeray and Ackroyd are pulled apart. If Hall pulls her punches in the final part of the denouement, we forgive her. Overall, Deep Freeze is a very satisfying read.
Judith Cutler
ECHOES OF LIES-Jo Bannister, Allison & Busby (£17.99) I
was determined not to like this novel, in fact I asked editor Stotter to send me something I could slaughter. But I got a pleasant surprise. Although the heroine, researcher come PI Brodie Farrell was a bit po-faced at times she was someone that it wasn't too hard to spend a bit of time with. The plot works nicely and there's some hard-boiled violence bits that work too. Apparently Bannister has written twenty or so novels, so she should know what do to by now, and does. Will pass a wet winter afternoon very nicely.
EVERY LAST CENT, Jonathan Gash (Macmillan £16.99hbk)
I have to make a confession here. I had never read a Lovejoy novel before this one. I greatly enjoyed the television series but it is only now that I understand just how sanitised it was. The "real" Lovejoy is infinitely randier, more unscrupulous, more poverty-stricken (his own fault, of course). But you can't help liking him. He has a soft side that is very appealing - and what woman could resist a man who truly believes that all women, regardless of age, style and shape, are truly desirable? None of them do. The story is told with great panache in the first person, and is very complicated. There are a great number of characters many, I am sure, familiar to devotees of the series - and not a straightforward or honest person in sight, with one exception. Local antique dealers are worried because a local tad, Mortimer, is making a name for himself as a 'divvy'. A divvy is someone who has the innate ability to tell instantly whether an antique is fake or not. This gift can be used honestly or dishonestly, and the trouble with Mortimer is that he is honest. He is also Lovejoy's illegitimate son, and has inherited the gift from him. Although he lives in a shed, he actually owns Saffron Fields Manor, currently let to a wealthy American couple, the Eggers, who commission Lovejoy to find a group of divvies who will have to display their talent in public. Lovejoy knows that this is impossibility, because true divvies are very, very rare, so he gathers a group of out-of-work actors instead. The Eggers are also interested in a portrait of a lady by Leonardo. Lovejoy knows the one they mean, because he forged it himself. Lovejoy gradually comes to realise that he is becoming involved in a war between rival international antiques mafias, which becomes increasingly nastier as several people are murdered along the way. Jonathan Gash is a wonderfully original and entertaining writer. The labyrinth plot is littered with carelessly dropped gems of esoteric information about history, antiques and art. I loved it. It hope it's not true that 90% of antiques are fakes. I am beginning to view my own modest collection with some disquiet.
FAMOUS LAST WORDS, Timothy Findley. (Faber & Faber £7.99pbk)
Timothy Findley is one of Canada's finest writers yet it's taken twenty years for his best novel to be published in Britain. The wait has been worthwhile. Famous Last Words is a small masterpiece, a penetrating study of the intellectual appeal of Fascism during the thirties and forties. Hugh Selwyn Mauberley is the subject of one of Ezra Pound's most striking poems. He seems an unlikely protagonist in a novel but Findley's exploration of his character and of his murky past compels attention. The story begins in 1910 when Mauberley's father takes him on to the roof of the Arlington Hotel in Boston to show him the sights of the city. The old man then jumps off the roof to his death - the first of many bizarre events in Mauberley's extraordinary life. We move swiftly to 1945 where a pro-Fascist Mauberley, fearing the approach of the Allies, escapes to a hotel, high in the Austrian Alps. It becomes his prison. When American officers of the liberating army find him, he has been murdered and mutilated, his corpse frozen solid. His father only left a small suicide note behind ("He who leaps has purpose. Remember. I leapt.") Mauberley, by contrast, has written a detailed account of the years between 1936 and 1945 on the walls of the hotel. It is left to Lieutenant Quinn to decipher the story. Shifting between first and third person narrative, it is a riveting tale of crime, scandal and political corruption, involving members of the British royal family as well as high-ranking Nazis. Ezra Pound flits in and out but the most memorable characters are the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, dodging a kidnap plot in Europe, settling reluctantly in the Bahamas and being implicated in all sorts of weird events. Mauberley is even able to shed new light on the notorious murder of Sir Harry Oakes. Famous Last Words is not merely a revelation to anyone interested in a crucial period of twentieth century history. It's a beautifully written study of a man impelled by his cultural values to make common cause with the brutal Nazi regime. The real achievement of the novel is the way that it retains sympathy for Mauberley. With all his defects, he is a fascinating character, shown from a variety of angles and in endless dramatic circumstances. By using the American officers as a framing device, Findley gets additional depth and perspective. A novel with literary flair and real purpose. And a vivid reminder of just how lucky Britain was when Edward V111 abdicated.
Keith Miles
DOUBLE SHOT: FEARLESS JONES, Walter Mosley (Serpent's Tail, £15.99hbk, £10.00tbp)
When they want information Philip Marlowe and Jake Gittes go to the LA Public Library. They have been going there for years by the time Paris Minton has come to town from his birthplace in the Deep South, and Paris hardly believes his luck when he discovers that the Public Library discards books it regards as unwanted, because Paris wants anything to do with books. Paris collects the discards and they become the basis of his bookshop in the ghetto - books and comics he buys and sells. Down the street the Holy Rollers may be rolling, and across the street the beauticians are straightening hair and lightening skin, but Paris likes to sit and read and wait for the customers who just pay his rent. Like Marlowe going to look for Florian's, though, a woman and a gorilla walk into Minton's life and before he knows it, Paris Minton is in deep trouble. Elana Love is her name but love ain't got nothing to do with it. In fact, Paris comes back from a night of love down on the shore - well, struggles back, because she has stolen his car among other things - to find that his bookshop has burned down. So Paris, who is big in some things, but small in the physical courage department, goes back to the bank for his savings and goes meet the fine on his friend Fearless Jones. Past and present start to cross as Paris and Fearless go uptown - from the black section to the white. Though even that is dubious because as far as the LA police are concerned Paris's new friends ain't white, they is Jews; honorary whites at best. As Paris tells us in his best literary narrator manner, things were different for blacks and Jews in LA fifty years ago. There is a foreign bond missing, Sol Tannenbaum may have stolen it from his accountant employers, but he has just done years in the slammer (where he met the Leon the gorilla who has now come looking for the reward for his protection) and may be a two-timing crook with a long line in promises and nothing to back them. Strange figures start appearing, unfortunately just as Paris is discovering new bodies. And figures out of the past; it was not just blacks like Paris who escaped to California to escape intolerance, there was intolerance and worse in Europe, where the bond came from. Paris may be smart, but it takes the courage (or stupidity or thoughtlessness) of Fearless Jones to bear all the deaths and shooting. Paris can't go to the police, not just because he has discovered that some of them are corrupt, but because no police officer will tolerate a black man with attitude. And Paris can't go to the church because it was there that Love first showed her face. In fact, Fearless Jones is noir noir, and life is at its darkest.
Les Hurst
Walter Mosley is one of the most well known crime writers around. Bill Clinton said that Mosley was the President's favourite writer. And his books receive lavish reviews in the newspapers. It is little wonder considering that he writes like a dream. In a masterstroke of political correctness his novels feature Afro-American working class heroes. Mosley's first novels featured the self-educated janitor Easy Rawlins and his psychopath friend Mouse and are set in Los Angeles just after the war. Well, his new book also features a self-educated black second-hand bookshop owner Paris Minton and his psychopath friend the Fearless Jones of the novel's title struggling against the odds in 1950s Los Angeles. One almost expects Easy Rawlins to makes a guest appearance. This enables Mosley to return to the period with which his readers most associate him, but to avoid writing another Rawlins and Mouse novel. The period also allows him to comment on the endemic racism of the period - in which I think he goes over the top there surely must have been cops in the LAPD who did not beat up black people for the fun of it, as the vast majority of the police in this novel seem to want to do. Like others of his novels, it is written as if the narrative is retelling a story which took place 45 years ago, so he can include golly-gosh facts about the low fuel consumption of his hero's car and the amusingly low price of goods in the period. That said, if you ignore these irritations and the all encompassing political correctness (all black people are good unless they are very large, all white people are bad unless they are Jewish) it is a thunderingly good read and he makes points about the position of ethnic minorities in society which made a good old-fashioned WASP like me think. So it can't be all bad.
Simon Fowler
FORCE 12 James Thayer, Macmillan £16.99
James Thayer is a man with his eyes fairly on the constituency of readers previously catered for by the late Alastair MacLean with a number of war, adventure and spy thrillers under his belt. Here he tackles the sub-genre MacLean probably did best - the sea adventure. The age old battle of man - or as here, man and woman - against the sea is given a 21st century twist. The sea in this case is the eternally dangerous North Pacific in winter, but the boat that challenges it is an ultramodern example of modern technology. A completely computer controlled racing yacht, so advanced as to make its human crew almost superfluous and designed to take the worst the ocean can throw at it and remain afloat, so you know it's a gonner from the start. The vessel is the brainchild of computer billionaire Rex Wyman, who believes a victory in the cross-Pacific race he has organised, and loaded ever so slightly in his favour, will help save his threatened business. Essentially a fictional reworking of "The Perfect Storm" with a low key thriller element tacked on, it even has a guest cameo for the fishing-boat-skipper-who-takes-one-risk-too-many type of character that George Clooney played in the movie. And with an Alaskan helicopter winchman introduced as hero at the start, you can pretty much map out the plot for yourself. Thayer's character development also seems a touch half baked. Both heroic helicopter crewman Jess McKay and Wyman's computer genius girlfriend Gwen Weld are given motivational backstories about their family backgrounds, but as Wyman's yacht sails into the storm these are promptly forgotten as Thayer concentrates on the action. Is it an easily read and enjoyable book? Well, yes. But is it actually a good one? That answer has got to be: only average.
Calum MacLeod
FRACTIONS OF ZERO Bill Murphy (Hodder & Stoughton, £17.99)
In life, serial killers tend to be socially dysfunctional loners preying on society's soft targets; in fiction, we demand sophistication, wit, cunning and diabolical schematic arrangements from our psychopaths-we want the suave savagery of Jack the Ripper crossed with Cary Grant, or failing that, we want Anthony Hopkins. Bill Murphy doesn't go that far, but the schematic arrangements are piled high in this, his second novel, with the Fibonacci sequence, the moons of Saturn, the California state lottery, Beethoven, Keats, social security numbers and much more brought into play as the crazy/brilliant killer pursues a tortuous methodology to choose victim, method of execution and dump site. Pursuing him in turn, and decoding the fiendish clues he helpfully leaves behind, are FBI agent Nancy Kronziac and Brit maths professor James Ellstrom; once the basics are established, the novel settles into a pattern of its own, with abduction/death/puzzle-solving/recovery-of-body scenes following in quick succession. Some of this puzzle solving-especially the first few codes Ellstrom cracks-is hazily dealt with; Vignere squares and the Babbage cryptoanalysis method are name-checked, but we have to take it on trust that Ellstrom's dead brainy: he doesn't show his working out. Later, he's a little more diligent. Meanwhile, scenes shift rapidly, and a fair bit of maths-lore is thrown into the mix, including a tip on which lottery numbers to pick (the ones that nobody else does, apparently). The impression is of a lot of research having been done, none of which is about to be wasted. Like John Connolly, Murphy is an Irishman writing American thrillers; unlike his compatriot, Murphy's not so immersed in the language and culture that his book's as much about America as it is a thriller. He's not as style-driven, and nor is his plot as deeply anchored in character. But there are nice touches. Kranzio looks at a picture of a missing girl, offered by the girl's grieving father: "the one he would show buyers at the car lot to close a sale." High-concept thrillers too often lose sight of the people involved. More moments like this would have helped keep this one grounded.
Mick Herron
GANGSTER, Lorenzo Carcaterra (Simon & Schuster £10.00tbp)
Half a century ago the great adventure tales were cowboy stories - good versus bad guys, simple values and lots of shooting; women in the background. Now, when adventure fiction is dominated by serial killer and sicko violence thrillers, you look for those clean uncomplicated adventures among war stories and tales of the Mafia - good versus bad, simple values and lots of shooting; women in the background. Violence and loyalty are at the heart of these stories: violent death, and loyalty to either the Platoon or the Family. The classic Mafia family starts from the humblest beginnings and grows rapidly to acquire vast illicit riches - thus providing a sweeping, engaging, almost mythic story. So it is with Gangster, by Lorenzo Carcaterra. Paolino Vestieri takes on the Mafia in Salerno, loses a son, and leaves to seek a new life in America. On the wretched, cramped and sinking vessel trundling them to the States, his wife - in a scene crying out to be set to music by Giuseppe Verdi - gives agonising birth to his second son, Angelo Vestieri, who will grow up to become the most feared mob leader in New York. Angelo's violent birth, childhood and adoption by the Mafia are captured in dark and glowing Italian colours. His remorseless career and doomed love are choreographed with all the splendour of Verdi's Requiem. A word of clarification here: this is not one of those Italian-American sagas where everyone speaks as if auditioning for Goodfellas - the language here is muscular, literate and razor-sharp. The story-telling is superb. Angelo trusts one man, his childhood companion and protector Pudge (who deserves a better name) and at the peak of his career becomes protector himself to another homeless Italian kid, the boy he will groom to inherit his empire, the boy who narrates this fictional biography. Gangster reads as both fiction and biography - fiction in that it's a thrilling tale, magnificently told; biography in that it is crammed with the history and minutiae of the American Mafia. Carcaterra (author of the best-selling Sleepers) sweeps you along in a breath-taking drama whose images are as brightly coloured as an Italian dawn, but whose pain and violence is the colour of velvet night. There is melodrama in the book - Angelo's birth, a couple of confrontations, a late twist or two - but it doesn't matter a jot: Carcaterra never set out to give you an everyday tale; instead he has produced a wonderfully larger than life saga about larger than life people. You wouldn't want to meet Angelo Vestieri but you wouldn't want to miss reading his story.
Russell James
GOODNIGHT, SWEET PRINCE, David Dickinson (Constable £16.99hbk)
David Dickinson has a distinguished background with the BBC having been editor on Newsnight and Panorama, as well as series editor on the three-part programme, Monarchy. Here he has produced one of those daring books in which he makes the assumption that an actual historical event was not as presented in the history books. This is the death of the elder son of the Prince of Wales in 1892, from influenza, as set out in the record. The supposition is that the influenza was a cover-up, and the prince was very bloodily murdered in his bed at Sandringham. Prince Eddy by all accounts was a pretty shady character, and if be had lived would in due course have inherited the throne. Some writers have connected him to the mystery of Jack the Ripper. A different set of misdeeds are laid at his door here, no less horn horrifying. This novel is obviously intended to be the first of a series, and introduces the dashing Lord Francis Powerscourt, a great friend of Lord Rosebery, who is initially called in by the Prince of Wales' private secretary to investigate attempts at blackmailing his royal master. This is a dangerous enough assignment, but then Prince Eddy is murdered, the influenza story is cooked-up, and Powerscroft is instructed o discover the identity of the murderer, while maintaining the greatest secrecy. Powerscroft is a member of a real Irish aristocratic family, who owned one of the most beautiful stately homes in Ireland. He is a charismatic hero in the old tradition of thoroughly decent upper class chaps, but he has brains and a sense of humour as well. His investigations lead him back to the time Prince Eddy spent as a naval cadet, and even more scandalous and horrifying facts emerge. The equerry who found the prince's body has committed suicide and this opens a further line of inquiry. Lord Francis finds more than enough people who could justifiably wish the prince to go to his rest, unaccompanied by flights of angels. The trail eventually leads Powerscroft to Venice, and the identity of Prince Eddy's murderer is revealed. This whole episode is rather surreal, whit a haunting description of the Serenissima in the winter mists. You would expect this to be the end of the book, but it's not. The murderer of Prince Eddy is slain in his turn, and Powerscroft has to make another visit to Italy. The body has been mutilated in the same way as Prince Eddy's. This I find unconvincing - it gives too much away about the perpetrator. Powercroft's own life is threatened, and he only escapes with the aid of a friendly Italian police officer. When he arrives back in England, he has to deal with all the loose ends in his own way, and it is only then that he can bring his courtship of the lovely Lady Lucy to a satisfactory result - their frequently interrupted romance has been running throughout. Believers of conspiracy theories relating to the death of Princess Diana will love this book. I doubt it will be popular with the Royal Family, but I found it really compulsive reading.
Maureen Carlyle
GREEN GIRLS, Michael Kimball (Headline, 10.00hbk)
Michael Kimball is a long-time Shots favourite, and this book confirms his standing as a fine writer of psychological suspense. In fact, the first half of this book is exceptional, as unsuccessful writer Jacob Winter finds his life unravelling around him: accused of assault on his wife's lover (his psychiatrist), about to lose his son, his house, his life. He is bailed out of jail by a woman from his past, a lesbian whose partner, July, from the rainforests of South America, exerts a strange influence on her, and on him, and whose past literally comes back to haunt them. While Winter's story dominates, this is gripping. The novel of paranoia is incredibly hard to pull off successfully, but Kimball does a fine job of building the set-backs against Winter. These are made even more believable by Kimball's equally adept handling of sex scenes; he may be as good as anyone writing at conveying female sexuality and making it convincing. Where the story lets down is where the two strands come together. Although the double pursuit of July's drug-dealing shaman husband, who escapes from a Florida jail, is a well-told story in its own right, it pales before the more subtle disintegration of Winter and his world in Maine. The contrasts are nicely done, but the denouement smacks of action-hero movie; Bruce Willis in THE PLAYER meets VERTIGO perhaps. One of the problems with the paranoid suspense novel is the better you build it up, the harder it is to make it all work. That is the trap Kimball has laid for himself, and the mere fact that he can set himself such a daunting task is reason enough to read this fascinating novel.
THE HAMPTON CONNECTION, Vincent Lardo (Piatkus, £17.99hbk)
The Hamptons, Long Island, are a rich guys' playground, but regular folks live there too. Job Ryan runs a fishing lodge with his foster son Bill, but hard times drive them to a little light drug smuggling. Once in the clutches of the local runners it's not easy to get out, but when Bill is almost caught in a raid they decide enough's enough, and Bill fakes estrangement from the family and legs it for the bright lights to try his hand at acting. One year on he's back, treading the boards at the local theatre. On opening night, his foster sister Heather's found strangled with a designer jockstrap in his lodgings; the local cops investigate, aided by a wealthy but very chummy movie producer "of youthful physique and boyish countenance". This is all pleasant and inoffensive. The central mystery hardly sets the pulse racing: how come the body is found in a locked cottage to which there are only three, or possibly four, keys? Thorough interrogation would have cracked this in two minutes flat, but cops who rely on amateur help don't go in for that stuff; instead, various sets of characters hash over information to which the reader has been privy all along. Idle chatter uncovers a clue. The villain is arrested. Rather good wine all round. None of which is bad, especially; it's just dull. If what serves as prologue Bill Ryan's backstory had been withheld a while, it might have been intriguing; as it is, we know too much too soon. Still, there's a nice conceit whereby the film in pre-production is based on the events of Lardo's previous novel (enough of which is revealed to save you reading it). The one passage that did haunt me is the following: "Eddy Evans was at home with clichés. They said it all in as few words as possible and everyone understood their meaning." The cliché in question is: "That makes the cheese more binding." A poll of American friends produced bafflement. Translation, please?
Mick Herron
HOSTAGE, Robert Crais (Orion £12.99)
Crais just gets better and better. And with his latest two novels being made into Hollywood blockbusters, presumably richer and richer. And good luck to him. He deserves it. Not only is he a great crime writer, but an all-round good bloke as I can testify since I had lunch with him a while back. Hostage is a convoluted tale of crimes colliding, and what starts as a simple convenience store hold-up ends up with mob involvement plus a head in the freezer. The hero, Jeff Talley has taken a job as chief-of-police in a small town after his career with the LAPD's SWAT team ends in personal and professional disaster. But sometimes although you run, you can't hide from yourself. A knockout from start to finish.
THE HUNTED Alan Jacobson (Coronet, £6.99pbk)
When Dr. Lauren Chambers' husband fails to return from a skiing trip, she rapidly descends into what might be paranoia-bedsheets change themselves; milk cartons disappear; the dog lets itself in and out of the house. More disturbingly for nervous, agoraphobic Lauren, she begins to question whether "Michael Chambers" was who she'd thought he was. And then what might have been an effective low-key chiller goes into overdrive, with Michael being hunted not only by Lauren and friendly local PI Nick Bradley, but also by his own former FBI colleagues, various security forces, and a recently released psychotic hitman at whose forthcoming retrial Michael will be the star witness, provided his memory returns. Jacobson lets the reader in on most of what's happening at an early stage; this seems at first a little self-defeating in a suspense novel, but it quickly becomes apparent that what he has in mind is a Jeffery Deaver-ish rollercoaster of plot twists, switchbacks and cliffhanging chapter endings. To some extent he achieves this-there are several nice set pieces, particularly an early encounter between Lauren and the bad guy-but there's no escaping the fact that the plot hinges on a case of amnesia, which should be up there with identical twins in any list of thriller no-nos, and the twists depend once too often on misinformation. There's a difference between steering the reader towards a wrong conclusion and having a character simply lie to him/her. But the writing is fluent, and everything builds to a widescreen climax complete with helicopter antics and unexpected revelations. Lauren's agoraphobia seems an add-on, as nothing much is made of it, and Nick Bradley remains a cipher, but this is probably deliberate-Bradley raises the reader's suspicions long before he does Lauren's. And Jacobson can do people when he tries; there's a well-drawn relationship between two CIA operatives, though the time spent sketching in their personal lives does ring warning bells somehow, like that moment in a war-movie when a soldier produces a photograph of his beloved. Apart from the amnesia-and Lauren's breathtakingly unethical behaviour right there in Chapter One-this mostly works.
Mick Herron
IN A TRUE LIGHT John Harvey (Heinnemann £10.00hbk)
It has to take a great deal of courage for an author to end a successful series with an on-going hero; especially after rave reviews, publicity, etc. (Think Frieling and Van der Valk). But that's exactly what John Harvey has done - and deserves accolades for his bravery. Resnick was established as one of the most successful crime figures around the world. Hell, John comes up for Dagger awards, gets invited to crime conventions all over - because he appeals to all kinds of countries. And then he drops Resnick and tries a whole new tack. Which is brilliant, and totally different (save for the writing).... Sloane is getting on 60 years old and just out of prison for art forgery. He's an ambitious, but failed painter, who agreed to fake up some minor masterpieces for a shady dealer. He's also (no surprise in Harvey's work) a jazz fan, who long ago had an affair with an older, female, painter who sends him a message as she lies dying. Sloane visits her, and her lesbian lover in Italy, and is told that he has a daughter he never knew about, who's a jazz singer mixed up with a (possibly) violent man who might be connected to the Mafia. So Sloane goes to New York - OK, cue jazz references - he finds his daughter, and finds that her lover is a possible serial killer who likes beating up on women. Enter New York cops Vargas (get the reference?) and Cherry (who might be gay) and along the way a sexy art-dealer. Enough of the plot...it's too fascinating to reveal. All hints of old relationships and possible incest, and the main thing is that it's brilliant: Harvey teases the reader - who's going to do what next? What is going to happen? How will this end? What, for me, comes over in Harvey's writing is a marvellous sense of PLACEMENT. Whether he's writing about the Nottingham of Resnick, or New York, or North London, he establishes his characters in location and convinces the reader that he has walked down those streets. He reminds me in a more fundamental way of James Lee Burke, who has that same sense of placement, only Harvey is, in my opinion, more convincing. This a brave and beautiful novel by an author who's willing to take a chance, and deliver something really good. Read it!
INCRIMINATING EVIDENCE Sheldon Siegel. (Piatkus £17.99hbk)
The firm of Malone and Fernandez has a very strange case on their hands. The District Attorney wants them to act as his defence. He has been found in a hotel room with a dead male prostitute, and he wants them to get him off. They don't like him and he doesn't like them, but they are the best. His daughter is arrogant and unhelpful, and then they find themselves saddled with another lawyer who is well known as a publicity seeker. To make things worse, the police find handcuffs, sex magazines, and bondage photographs in the D.A.'s locker. As Malone and Fernandez investigate, they find a web of vice and intrigue including drugs, prostitution and pornography. Not just one, but a whole family of skeletons comes tumbling out of the closet before the case is over. I really loved this. Wonderfully realised characters for a start. The team of Malone and Fernandez are great. Both divorced, from each other, they still go to bed together, which causes a headache for the parish priest when taking confession. Mike Malone is also an ex-priest. The third member of the team, Carollyn O'Malley is an ex- member of the prosecution team who happens to be the accused's ex-lover, and hates his guts. Nothing is simple. That is what makes this such a good read. I found it difficult to put down and wouldn't hesitate in recommending this to you.
John Orum
IN FIDELITY (an evocative tale of love, desire and betrayal) M.J. Rose, (Piatkus £6.99pbk)
As pretentious as its cover, this book should have been better than it is. Imagine knowing that you are responsible for your beloved father's murderer and that the man who did it - your one-time lover - is out of prison and wants revenge. An excellent premise but without the matching delivery. That said, it's worth reading for the image of the rose which will always remind the heroine of her father's death. A good ending with some good writing but still pretentious - as its sub-title suggests.
Fiona Shoop
ISLE OF DOGS, Patricia Cornwell, (Little, Brown, £16.99hbk)
This is an interesting one. The jacket blurb tells me that it's the third in a trilogy, not that the news helps me since I've never touched the other two in the series, and that this has a 'Gripping plot, great characters, ironic humour.' Hmm. I picked up Isle Of Dogs full of anticipation. The sad fact is, I've never read any of P. Cornwell's work. Yes, I know, that makes me a sad old devil. I can only murmur in defence that I spend months each year writing, and the rest of the year is spent trying to read through the backlog of historical books which have thumped on my doormat, and reviewing thrillers and crime novels for other people, which means I have little say in what I look through. I've never been asked to read a Cornwell before. And having read this, I have to say that I can't imagine paying money to buy another. I couldn't finish it. Don't get me wrong, this isn't to say that the book won't appeal to you or to millions of others, but it wasn't my sort of book. Why? Well, here goes. The story is 'an irreverent portrait of politically driven law enforcement run amok . . .' Basically it takes the example of a Governor of Virginia who is almost blind, who is dull-witted, whose main preoccupations are satisfying the public and his 'submarine' - that is, his bowels. At his side is the spin-doctor, a corrupt official who's using his position to make himself wealthy. Not much new there, then. There are the police officers: Judy Hammer, who is superintendent of the State Police, and her right-hand confidant, Andy Brazil, both of whom are trying to protect the public from the politicians and from a particularly murderous group calling itself 'Pirates'. And I'm afraid that's where I lost it, with the police. In the first few pages we are given the depiction of a brutal murder, one which wouldn't look adrift in any standard thriller - but with this one, we're supposed to laugh. That set my teeth on edge instantly. Don't get me wrong, I really enjoy Peter Guttridge's work and I can laugh out loud at some Robert Wilson's dark writing, and yet this one just missed it for me, and not by a tiny margin. The violence is too close to reality for it to amuse. And it didn't. The characterisation was so blunt and forced, it was painful; the plots were, well, ungripping in the extreme; and as for the claim on the jacket that she has 'a Swiftian eye for the absurd and a deadly accurate aim on her targets', I fear not. My strong reaction may well have been the result of a heavy weekend at Dead on Deansgate followed by rather too many meetings, but I don't think so. I wanted to enjoy it but basically I found it impossible to get into the book. On every page there was something that grated. Cornwell lacks the darkly comic ability of, say, Leslie Thomas, the sheer exuberance and satirical viciousness of Tom Sharp in his early days, the light touch of Wodehouse . . . I think she lacks anything that smacks remotely of humour. As I said, I couldn't finish this one. I managed the first 147 pages (I tried, God, how I tried) but any further self-torture was pointless. Keep to the forensic stuff, Pat. I'll try one of them next time, maybe I'll like that better.
Mike Jecks
KILLER INSTINCT Zoë Sharp, (Piatkus £17.99)
Ignore the cover, this book is actually good. Enter Charlie Fox, feisty and able to beat any man at his own game. Or is she? Can the Self-defence teacher and club bouncer protect herself or will her curiosity land herself - and those she loves - into deadly danger? With a rapist on the loose, a murder, drugs and fraud, the pace is fast but never lets itself go and Sharp takes the time to create a believable world of trendy clubs and inner city angst as the city tries to rebuild itself but can never escape a past of self-destruction, no matter how glossy its new exterior. This is a well-written book with good characters and a likeable lead in Charlie Fox. Watch out for Zoë Sharp whose second novel, Riot Act, is due out in 2002.
Fiona Shoop
KILLING THE FATTED CALF Susan Kelly (Allison & Busby £17.99hbk)
Killing the Fatted Calf is the second book in what looks to be a continuing series featuring Supt Gregory Summers. Taking a break from her 'Hope ' novels, Susan Kelly expands on the characters she introduced in The Lone Traveller, revisiting Gregory Summers, an ordinary man with an extraordinary private life, as he dips back into his past friendships to crack down on illegal immigrants into the United Kingdom. Instead of following the traditional plotting of a police crime novel, Kelly skewers the focus of the book from the official crime, the illegal immigrants being smuggled into Britain, to the study of morality being played out in the parallel story of Anthony Lucas and Elise Weissman. This structure is both the strength and weakness of the novel, as the reader is given two distinctive tones to jump between as the book progresses. Kelly creates a recognisable, realistic and comfortable police setting, with well rounded supporting players and a distinctive hero, moulded by his intelligence, and grounded by the day to day politics of police procedure. However the juxtaposition of this tone with the dark psychological manoeuvrings of the Weissmans and the prodigal son alluded to in the title, Anthony Lucas, interrupts the flow of the book stopping the reader from being drawn into another world, which would ensure compulsive reading until the end solution is arrived at. There is a distinct feeling of two stories being told in one novel, however Kelly does manage to tie the stories together creating a cohesive whole. Summers as a character, is likeable - although without reading the previous Summers' mystery, the reader may find themselves at a loss at his domestic arrangements. The distinctive second lead is Elise Weissman, whose morals, motives and life choices are unfolded to the reader, is a well written, charismatic and likeable protagonist. So much so that her story should have been told in more depth and detail in its own novel. Overall then, a well-written and well-plotted English crime with hints of a darker more psychological novel still to come from Susan Kelly. Nicely sewn together and a pleasant read.
Christine Campbell
LADY KILLER Ed McBain (Allison & Busby £6.99pbk)
Detectives Carella and Hawes of the 87th Precinct have problem: how to prevent a murder before it happens. A note is sent to the precinct threatening to kill 'the Lady' at 8pm that evening, but who is the Lady? it could be anyone, but they have three prospects-a prostitute, a singer, and a socialite. Any one of them could be the victim, or it could be someone else altogether. On top of that they are suffering from the August heatwave, which creates some humorous moments. It's a well-told story, which doesn't let up the pace, whilst at the same time not losing sight of the importance of dialogue and characterisation. Considering the length, which is only 150pp, this is a brilliant piece of writing. No padding, just a well told story. If only modern writers could take lessons from this master of the police procedural, a lot of trees could be saved.
John Orum
The Last Kashmiri Rose, Barbara Cleverly Constable £16.99
Congratulations to a new crime writer, shortlisted for the C.W.A./Sunday Times Debut Dagger Competition no less, on an extremely readable historical crime novel. And congratulations to her, too, for having the initiative to pick a period that nobody else is doing. With the success of ancient Rome, the medieval era. the 17th and 11th centuries, imitators are positively lurching Out of the woodwork, so it was with a great deal of pleasurable surprise that I saw that, as its ode suggests, The Last Kashmiri Rose was set in India in 1922, in the dying days of the Raj.
Every year and always in March, the only break being the years of the 1914-1911 war, one of the wives of the officers of the Bengal Greys has been dying violently in what appears on the surface to be an unfortunate accident: horse throwing rider over cliff, snake bite in an unfortunate part of the anatomy, and so on. Finally. though. a perfectly happy young woman apparently slashes her wrists in the bath, and this it too much for certain people to believe. Joe Sandilands, Scotland Yard detective and war hero, on secondment to the Bengal police, is called in and makes his way to Panikhat, the military station where all the incidents have taken place. What follows is a tense and exciting thriller as discoveries about the past and the present are slowly unravelled by the said Joe, who is meanwhile falling in love with Nancy, wife of the Collector, a grand but elderly figure, badly injured in the war. Shades of Lady Chatterly and all that.
Much as I enjoyed this hook, and I really did, it is not without flaws. First I must criticise the copy editing which allows the use of repetitive words and phrases to slip through unchecked. We are all guilty of repeating ourselves when writing but a new author should have been paid the courtesy of rigorous editing to ensure that her style flowed. Secondly I take some issue with the plot itself. The baddy begins to emerge rather too clearly for my liking, in the end the finger of guilt is pointing at him all too obviously. Nor do I feel that the dramatic events at the end would have been allowed to pass without questions being asked. I really cannot credit a Scotland Yard mart and an official of the Raj turning a blind eye to a shooting however much their love lives were involved. This brings me to my final point. Our hero, Joe Sandilands, is sexually set-up by Nancy, the Collector's wife, presumably to father a child that looks fake her husband, the similarity between the two men being spoken about earlier. Or did she juts want a good roll in the tea plants? Her motive was not apparent and I think that should have been clarified for the sake of readers like me who like loose ends tied up. No pun intended! But these are minor criticisms. This is an exciting start from a new author who has dare to do something different and I recommend it to all lovers of historical crime - of which there at many!
Deryn Lake
LOOKING FOR MR BIG, Maggie Hudson (Harper Collins, £5.99pbk)
What do barrister Deena King, a strong moral professional and Al Virtue, a South London villain have in common? The disappearance of their two children. While Al Virtue has been accused of some of the most audacious heists in London he has only once been convicted. King on the other hand has made a successful career out of prosecuting and putting criminals behind bars. She is the only person who has managed to convict Virtue for an offence and have him spend time behind bars. King's son and Virtue's daughter have gone missing while on a backpacking trip in Turkey. After the first initial shock wears off King and Virtue soon realise that they must form an uneasy and unlikely alliance if they are to find and get their children back alive. Their hunt soon takes them from London's underworld to the headquarters of a Colombian drug cartel. From the start both King and Virtue distrust each other vehemently and neither of them are happy about the amount of time they have to spend in each others company in order to solve the disappearance of their children. However, reluctantly they put their hatred of one another aside when they realise that the return of the two young students does not appear to be a priority for the forces of law and order. It appears that they are following a totally different agenda for their own purposes. Both parents soon find themselves drawn into a deadly game where the two young students are the pawns. Looking for Mr Big is a perfectly well paced novel. Surprisingly there is hardly any violence in this book despite the fact that one of the protagonists is a well-known criminal. The two main characters are well fleshed out but some of the minor ones could have been given a bit more to do. The sub-plot involving a romance between their various partners was also a distraction that spoilt the book. Furthermore, one could see the budding romance between King and Virtue a mile off. I found that part of the book to be somewhat trite. If King has the reputation she is supposed to have then she is unlikely to throw it all away on a fling with a South London criminal. It takes along time and you have to be extremely good at what you do to become a QC. However, despite all this, Looking for Mr Big is worth reading. It is one of those intriguing books that has been cleverly written but rather tame. Ayo Onatade
THE MALPAS LEGACY Sam Llewellyn, (Headline Feature, £9.99tbk/£17.99hbk)
It took until about page 60 to get into this book, by which time most ordinary readers will have put it back on the bookshop shelf. Even then I found it confusing, aggravating and hard to grasp. Malpas is a country house in County Waterford, in the south of Ireland and the story centres on the deaths of Desmond Costelloe, on the night before his wedding in 1910 and, more recently, of Steve Brennan, husband of the current owner - Helen Costelloe - plus the fate of the legendary 'Crown of Tara'. There are just too many named people to keep track of. Dealing with two deaths, 90 years apart, in the same place, with members of the same families involved, creates all sorts of confusion between who is related and married to whom and when. The story unfolds through revelations from three documents: the letters of Dulcie White, intended wife of Desmond Costelloe; the casebooks of Dr Costelloe, whom she married after Desmond's death and the 'Walker Archive'. Delving through documents in the decaying setting of the old house, populated by people with no visible means of support, who seem to being hanging out, living a wretched existence, gives the book a stuffy and tedious air. It seems filled with pointless incidents, that lead nowhere, and sleazy sex - always readily available. There is far too much detail on the private gasworks that powered the house and the hydroelectric generator that replaced it. An old well or cesspit could have taken their place and then we wouldn't have needed to know how the coal was brought from South Wales and all the rest of it. The Irish characters have the substance of cardboard - surly and bitter, and who wouldn't be - eking out their days in a dump like that, on a diet of fish and potatoes? Lieutenant Carruthers is beyond belief and surely there are enough people around for him not to have to double as the commander of a Black and Tan squad later in the story? Black and Tan men were not insane which makes their crimes all the worse. But a mother who thinks only of 'spare the rod and spoil the child' when Carruthers threatens her son with a gun is hardly credible as is most of the end of the book. You get no sense of satisfaction or closure when the truth is finally out, partly because the foundations are not laid earlier in the book and partly due to the rambling and incoherent plot and weak characters. You cannot care about the people and hope the house falls into the ground soon. If you want gripping stories of drama and violence in Ireland try Liam O'Flaherty's.
Martin Spellman
MUSIC AT THE GARDEN HOUSE Patricia le Roy, (Piatkus £6.99pbk)
A stylishly written novel which investigates betrayal and the confusing politics of 1990's eastern Europe. Just who can you trust to get you out alive and, well, save the world, when the Berlin Wall is no more but the KGB refuse to relinquish their hold over Moscow and links to Berlin? This could be a complicated, dull read but le Roy is better than that and delivers a good plot, sympathetic characters and a tense chase in an ever-changing world where nothing is certain - not even love. An enjoyable read with fascinating insights and a heady sense of drama.
Fiona Shoop
THE OTHER SIDE OF SILENCE, Natasha Mostert (Hodder & Stoughton £17.99hbk)
Tia Theron is a lecturer at a South African hospital. Her mother, a former musician disappears one night. There is no sign of a struggle. No crime has been committed. Tia is now alone, and spends most of her time in Johannesburg. Her peace is disturbed by Jon Falconer, a professor of Mathematics from America who has come over specially to visit the stone gongs on her property. One of his major interests is music, and his research has led him into partnership with a close friend, and his brother to create a game called the Angels Key, which is available free on the net. Its prime purpose is to create a perfect musical scale. But is it more than that? Why have its adherents become violent? And what is the importance of the stone gongs? A brilliant piece of writing. I would hesitate to call it a crime novel, and I certainly would not insult the writer by calling it a thriller. It is about music, magic, South Africa, but primarily about people. A wonderful read. Highly recommended.
John Orum
OXFORD DOUBLE Veronica Stallwood (Headline £17.99hbk)
Kate Ivory's latest outing has all the virtues of its predecessors. It's witty, charming, well-written and captures the spirit of Oxford with an accuracy that only someone who has lived and worked there can achieve. Romantic novelist, Kate Ivory, has new neighbours on either side of her but they do not survive for long. The Fosters, a retired couple, are gunned down by a hitman and the diffident academic who lives on the other side of Kate is killed in what appears to be tragic accident. When a fourth acquaintance dies unexpectedly, Kate wonders if she may be the next in line. Her investigation of the various deaths is spurred on. While the novel has Veronica Stallwood's usual strengths, it is bedevilled by a plot of almost operatic implausibility, a fact emphasized on the last page when Verdi's Falstaff is quoted. Mesmerised by a wig that a fellow-passenger is wearing on a flight from France, Kate does not realize that he is, in fact, her next-door neighbour. Whom should she bump into as she leaves Gatwick but the brother of her former lover, behaving in a strange way? From these two coincidences spring a whole host of others until they reach the point of incredulity. Kate's agent, a character of frightening authenticity, would never allow any of her authors to get away with such an unconvincing plot. The structural shortcomings distract from the real joys of the book. The dialogue is crisp and entertaining, most of the characters are well drawn and the research at the printing worlds is faultless. Many writers would identify with Kate's reaction when, still shaken by the murder of her neighbours, she is urged by her agent to give an interview to one of the television crews in the street because it might help her sales. And there are other delights. Oxford Double is an upmarket read with spice and surprise galore. It's just a pity it pulls the long arm of coincidence out of its socket.
Keith Miles
PLOTTED IN CORNWALL Janie Bolitho, (Constable Crime £16.99)
The characters' names conjure up the rich Cornwall heritage but Bolitho does not use the setting as much as she could which is a shame. What she does do is to create intricate, well-balanced relationships. A seemingly harsh father who, in reality, only wants the best for his son, two sisters bound together not by love but by a dark secret and the daughter of one of them, once missing, who reappears bringing answers to dark questions. And then there is the heroine of the novel, Rose Trevelyan, whose own relationship is crumbling until not even friendship is likely to survive. It is not the best-written book. It is, in fact, extremely disappointing, especially her almost painful use of dialect but ignore the mediocre plot with its slow pace and too obvious ending and read it for its use of relationships - a fascinating foray into human desires.
Fiona Shoop
THE PREDATOR, Michael Ridpath (Michael Joseph, £9.99tpb)
Lenka Nemeckova and Chris Szczypiorski are partners in a fledgling fund management company, having met on the "world-renowned training programme" of Wall Street's Bloomfield Weiss, where, with a group of fellow trainees, they studied bond mathematics and capital markets, loved, laughed, partied and covered up a not-quite-accidental death. Ten years on, past events rear their usual ugly heads: Lenka is murdered on a business trip to Prague, leaving Chris to discover which of his former fellows is responsible, while at the same time salvaging his business from the repercussions of Leak's final dodge deal. Ridpath's métier is the wheeler-dealer world, and these scenes - after the clunky death-in-Prague opening - rattle along nicely. Elsewhere, problems arise. Characterisation is perfunctory, some of the writing more so, and Chris's "deductions" are pure intuition ("Suddenly, Chris knew who the [killer] was."). Most damagingly for a crime novel, the plot leaks: the 10-year conspiracy begins unravelling when a character, for no very obvious reason, blurts out a confession to Lenka; she is furious, but not so furious she acts on the information before being bumped off herself. And the reason Chris never turns to the police is that the various crimes occurred in different countries, and they "would have to start a long and complicated international investigation." Well, yes, but aren't the police better equipped to handle that than a lone merchant banker? Throughout, it's the background of financial institutions that anchors the story, but given that events are generated by the villain's "major psychopathology" and cocaine abuse rather than the group's status as trainee bankers, there's no real reason why they shouldn't be student teachers or candlestick-makers. Still, this niche-approach worked for Dick Francis. Overall, what harms the book is lack of suspense-with only three suspects, the reader can identify the bad guy before Chris knows murder's been committed. Perhaps next time Ridpath should concentrate on everyday financial killings.
Mick Herron
PRETTY BOY, Lauren Henderson (Hutchinson £9.99tbp)
There is a successful mix of good descriptions of rural and city life in this novel. Comparisons are made between clothes, habits and food, especially food. There are many whimsical scenes in which cooking and its result, good or bad, gives more insight into character. Lauren Henderson also exhibits how the inhabitants of both worlds change when moving between the two environments. Sam Jones - protagonist - a sculptor and occasional sleuth does most of the moving. Her relationship with boyfriend, Hugo is not good but she is hoping that the New Year holiday they intend spending in the country will improve matters. Tom, an infant school teacher and Sam's best friend has found them a cottage close to where he lives. Tom has fallen in love with a local girl; Sam has fallen in lust with Alan, a younger man whose parents have problems, which is not helping the relationship with Hugo. Upon her return to London, Sam confides in Lurch, a young art student who is also her assistant. It is he who accompanies her back to the country when Tom telephones to say there has been a murder and he is the principal suspect. Only when a second body is discovered does Sam come near to the truth and finds herself in danger. Formulaic plotting, maybe, but told in the first person, with humour and bleak moments nicely balanced it does not seem so. There are no stereotypes and the characters evolve as their situations alter. Sam is outrageous and sexy and kind and loyal and likes to believe she is mixed-up, an enigma and is therefore surprised when her friends and lovers see through her. This is an entertaining book which does not try to fathom why people behave as they do or to moralise, and although the motive for the killings is a little weak it is the telling of the story here which is more interesting. The only puzzle, which isn't solved, is where Sam is going with her relationship.
PLAIN BROWN WRAPPER, Karen Grigsby Bates (Avon, $13.00hbk)
Plain Brown Wrapper introduces us to the somewhat disordered and sardonic world of Alex Powell, a trendy, single, 30ish, droll but cynical African-American journalist with an attitude! This debut novel revolves around the death of a prominent powerful black publisher. The dead man Ev (erret) Carson is not only a ladies man but also Alex's former boss and the mastermind behind "Diaspora" the latest and most controversial black magazine currently available in the country. When her former boss is found dead in his luxurious bed just before he is due to accept his award for Black Journalist of the Year at the National Association of Black Journalists Conference. Alex feels bound to investigate the matter especially since she was the one who found the body. Spurred on by an exceedingly unconvinced LAPD detective and with the help of a journalist friend Paul Butler, Alex begins her own investigation. The trail leads from the West Coast to the East Coast to Washington D.C and New York. While searching amongst the "dissed" and disgruntled colleagues and ex-colleagues, the legions of enemies and dumped ex-girlfriends that Ev Carson managed to acquire; Alex soon comes to realise that if she is not careful, before it is over Ev Carson might not be the only one found dead. Plain Brown Wrapper is a very tongue in cheek mystery that has been narrated from an African-American point of view. However, one can also say that this is not so much a mystery novel as a romp and an insight into the behaviour, attitudes and the lives and loves of single black influential journalists. It is also clear from this book that a lot of backstabbing goes on in the media especially if you want to get to the top of the profession. The fact that the author of this book is a journalist means that you get a bird's eye view. No doubt there will be a number of comparisons to Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum series and it is clear that this debut novel has been written in that vein. However, there is a big difference between Ms Plum and Alex Powell. The most important one being that unlike Stephanie, Alex Powell is extremely smart and dammed good at her job! If you have never really understood the lingo that the young and trendy members of the ethnic minority use amongst themselves then you are in for a treat. You'll certainly have a greater knowledge of them by the time you have finished reading this book. The quips come thick and fast and there were times when I was laughing so much I had to stop. The fact that I understood the jokes and comments and could relate to them as well didn't spoil my enjoyment of the book. This is an amusing debut novel and a welcome to the field of African-American mystery writers. One can only assume that this is the first in the series, and if so I can't wait to read the further exploits of Alex Powell. Ayo Onatade
PREY TO ALL, Natasha Cooper (Pocket Books £5.99pbk)
Deb Gilbert is serving a life sentence for the murder of her father. Trish Maguire, a Barrister, with a strong belief in justice is persuaded by Anna Grayling, an old friend who runs an independent television production company, to help her prove Deb Gilbert is innocent. Trish quickly becomes aware that nearly everyone thinks that Deb is guilty, but after visiting her in prison Trish is not so sure. This feeling is reinforced when she talks with the QC who defended her in court, the family Doctor, and Deb's staunch supporter, the high profile MP Chaze. Whilst pursuing her investigations, juggling her heavy case load and visiting her father in hospital, who is in intensive care after a heart attack, Trish feels the strain on her relationship with her partner George. When Trish, only recently reconciled with her father finally summons the courage to ask him the question, 'Why did you leave?' she is devastated by the answer. This is a book about family and relationships, rage, frustration, despair, pain and ultimately murder. The characterisation is brilliant. I also enjoyed meeting again several characters introduced in the previous two books. Although, this can be read as a stand-alone book, I found it interesting to see the development of some of the supporting characters. The third in the Trish Maquire series is the best yet.
Lizzie Hayes
THE RED ROOM, Nicci French (Michael Joseph. £16.99hbk £9.99pbk)
Dr. Katherine (Kit) Quinn is a psychologist working at a clinic, but sometimes working for the police to assess prisoners who they think may be dangerous. On what seems like a simple assessment, she is injured by the prisoner, and afterwards suffers from nightmares. some time later, she is called in by the police again, this time on a murder suspect. The suspect is the man who injured her previously. She disagrees with the police, arguing that he was not the type to carry out a vicious crime. After a great deal of argument, he is released. Another body is found in another part of London, but the police do not connect the two. Kit does. Her relationships with the police plummet when she befriends a man who runs the hostel near where the first victim was found. The police suspect that he allows drug deals to be done on the premises, and he has no love for them either. Things are made even more difficult for Kit when an old friend comes to stay. The reasons for the killings are unclear. What is the connection between a homeless teenager and a well off middle class mother? It is only when Kit puts her own life in danger that all is revealed. I haven't read any of this duos books before but I had heard a lot of good about their writing. Unfortunately I was disappointed with this. The heroine could have come straight out of a 'had I but known ' story, and her love interest was morose and unsympathetic. One of the main constituents of a good story is to have a lead character that the reader wants to identify with. I didn't find anyone in this tale that I could sympathise with; in fact, I would have sympathised with anyone who had thrown all of them into a cell and thrown away the key. Not for me I'm afraid.
John Orum
THE REPENTANT RAKE, Edward Marston (Headline £17.99hbk)
It is sometimes refreshing to get away from a murky world where there are no true heroes or villains, and everybody is up to no good in one form or another. In Edward Marston's novels there are characters who are definitely good, without being boring, and others who are evil through and through. You know at the beginning that the good will triumph, and the evil receive their just deserts. Our hero is Christopher Redmayne, a young architect in Restoration London. After the Great Fire you would think that an architect would have little free time, but Christopher is a part-time sleuth as well, together with his sidekick, the worthy Puritan constable, Jonathan Bale. Christopher is about to be given a lucrative commission to build a London house for Sir Julius Cheever, a Northamptonshire squire who has ambitions to become a Member of Parliament, and thus introduce a few morals to pleasure-loving London society. Christopher visits Sir Julius' home and discovers that not only does he have an attractive daughter, making the commission even more desirable, but a son, Gabriel, whom he has disowned because of his profligate life-style. Meanwhile in London, Jonathan Bale finds the body of a well-dressed young gentleman at St. Paul's Wharf, who has been strangled and run through with a sword. To add to Christopher's workload his ne'er-do-well brother, Henry, and others in his circle of society' hangers-on, are being blackmailed by someone who seems to know all about their misdemeanours. Christopher learns that Gabriel Cheever was also a member of Henry's circle, until his fairly recent disappearance. When the Paul's Wharf body is identified as Gabriel, and Christopher learns that he had repented of his immoral life and was now respectably married, it begins to emerge that all these events are connected. Gabriel wished to become a successful writer. He had kept a detailed diary of the events of his former life and the doings of his erstwhile friends. This diary has disappeared and must be the source of the blackmail. The plot is ingenious and carries you along with it. At the same time the likeable Christopher's romance with the spirited Susan Cheever, who had remained in secret contact with her brother, blossoms. Christopher and Jonathan realise that several people are involved in the blackmail, and gradually they are unmasked. As in his Domesday and Elizabethan series, Edward Marston reveals a wide knowledge of his period and his characters bring it to life. Maureen Carlyle
RESOLUTION, Denise Mina (Bantam Press £12.99hbk)
Within the various genres we crime writers are saddled with there are some writers who seem to vie with each other to create the bleakest, grimmest picture of their urban environment. Once, this was male territory but those days are long past, and today, among the tough and talented young women who pull on their leathers and boots to trudge through the gutters, few paint in darker colours than Scottish writer, Denise Mina. Set in her favoured locale of Garnethill in Glasgow, where 'the sun vacillates between freezing rain and not-so-freezing rain', Resolution completes her much praised trilogy. In this book, practically every character is a psychological wreck. Abused in childhood, abusers themselves, outsiders shunned by 'normal' society, they scrabble and claw their way through the squalor, listlessly seeking their own sordid and imperfect resolutions. For the opening scenes, even the Garnethill ghetto is not dark enough. Standing above the slip road to the motorway, 'few outsiders wandered into it. It was an island state in the heart of the city.' But on a rare day of sunshine at least the 'shards of glass in the yellow and burgundy sandstone glinted'. Down in the flea market, however, 'trapped between the river and a high railway viaduct', the sun never shone. Maureen, a university graduate (abused) now selling contraband cigarettes, becomes embroiled in the murder of an illiterate stallholder (abused), said to be a prostitute, but now trying to fight her own brothel-keeping son in the small claims court. Maureen doesn't need this: her own abusive father is back in the neighbourhood; the warped psychiatrist on trial for murdering her boyfriend wants to drag Maureen into his defence case; her friends struggle with demons: alcoholism, anorexia, boyfriends who won't move out. For many readers, this book will be too dark and unremitting, with less humour than earlier in the series, little pity, and with no slimy stone unturned. But Mina's fans will relish her uncompromising gaze and earthy prose - and her characters are beyond caring what anyone thinks.
Russell James
REVENGE, Maureen O'Brien (Little Brown £16.99hbk)
Unhappy with her marriage to Dan, Jude Craig is having an affair with young, handsome freelance journalist Lee Han. But when she leaves him asleep little does she know what is going to happen next. Lee's flat is burnt down and his body is so badly burnt it is unrecognisable. When Detective John Bright begins to question Jude she soon comes to realise that she was the last person to see Lee alive. Could the person who started the fire have been watching the house waiting for her to leave? More to the point what does she tell Dan? How can she answer the questions put to her truthfully without revealing her affair but also remove herself from the list of prime suspects? How much does Dan really know? As Detective Bright continues his investigations he soon realises that there is more than one possible reason in a myriad of possibilities. Lee Han's work as a freelance journalist has meant that he has made a lot of enemies. This is a story of love, corruption, murder and of course revenge. The landscape switches from London to Hong Kong and back again to London. Revenge is not really an intricate tale. The basic premise is to find who committed this cruel deed. Sadly, this book failed to hold my attention. It is not that Revenge is not an interesting book to read it is just that at times it felt as if it was running out of steam. The novel has a lot of admirable qualities. Some parts of it are well written and it is very atmospheric. However, three-quarters of the way through it I could not careless whether or not they found Mr Han's killer. Some readers might enjoy this, but as hard as I tried I did not.
Ayo Onatade
DOUBLE CARTER: RHODE ISLAND RED (Five Star/Serpent's Tail, £6.99pbk) & DRUMSTICKS by Charlotte Carter (Serpent's Tail £6.99pbk)
As Serpent's Tail publish Charlotte Carter's third Nanette Hayes mystery in a trade paperback, they are re-issuing the first in their Five Star series. (They publish the second, COQ AU VIN, too). She looks like Grace Jones, only better. I'd like to meet Nanette - you would, too. If you are a man that is because Nan just oozes sex appeal; if you are a woman, well, Nan is the sort that everybody likes. Be warned, though. People who hang around with Nan tend to drop dead - she starts every book with a lot more friends than she ends with. Nan doesn't have much of a centre in her life. As RHODE ISLAND RED begins she is scraping a living as a street entertainer, playing jazz on her saxophone, having an on/off relationship with her black yuppie boyfriend, before another street musician who has crashed on the floor of her New York appointment never wakes up. Someone with an icepick has seen to that. It isn't long before Nan discovers that he was an undercover cop - the investigating detectives find it hard to believe that he would want to go back to Nan's place, though she escapes the full third degree. What Nan can't understand, though, is why none of them mention the "old lady" he had talked about, and she has to go looking. Still, looking doesn't pay the rent. Things on that front improve when an older guy starts dropping dead presidents wrapped around roses in her hat, and then asks her to improve his knowledge of Charlie Parker - she finds his apartment is a shrine to "The Bird". Strange tastes for an obvious mobster, huh? Not so strange as when she goes back to find the apartment empty and the building superintendent denies any knowledge of his former denizen. Here's a good line of business. Sell a piece to Nanette - she pays and gets through them like a rock star through a line of snow. But they never get used before they're lost, and she never learns. Don't worry, though, the people round her use them plenty. In COQ AU VIN Nanette goes to Paris. She's back for DRUMSTICKS and those pieces are still in action. Someone is shooting anyone to do with the New York rap scene, and more. Nanette is so pleased to get a residency that she has invited another street seller to come along on her first night. Scarcely has Ida the doll maker walked through the club door when she has been gunned down. The police wonder about the true target, and this time Nanette is able to work with them in a more formal way. Until now, Nanette's ear for jazz has allowed her to block out the increasingly ubiquitous rap music, but she has to discover how enormous an industry it has become, along with what people will do to take their share of its big profits. It takes her longer to discover what other people will do to keep their children out of it. And boys, Nanette can show how friendly she can be even with a bullet through her leg and a married man in her arms. That's grrrl power, I believe.
Les Hurst
RISKING IT ALL: ANN GRANGER (Headline, £17.99hbk)
The name Ann Granger is synonymous with a civilised read, as anyone familiar with the Meredith and Markby novels will testify. In the Fran Varady series, Granger is moving away from the village cosy to a more urban setting. Fran Varady is a homeless young actor, living for the time being in a friend's garage. She is an attractive heroine - a streetwise Meredith, perhaps - with a kindly Asian friend, Ganesh, who spends most of his time trying to save Fran from herself. This adventure, the fourth in the series, sees Fran confronting her past. Usually the sleuth herself, she is tailed by Clarence Duke, an unsavoury private detective. He brings her the unwelcome news that Eva, the mother who abandoned Fran fifteen years ago, now wants to see her. Only the knowledge that Eva is dying makes Fran agree. The reconciliation is going to be fraught - especially when Eva begs Fran to find another member of the family, Fran's younger half-sister. The pace quickens when the PI - whom both mother and daughter distrust - is found dead, right by Fran's pad. The police, notably the dour and drab Inspector Janice Morgan, are deeply suspicious of Fran's activities. Fran soon locates her missing half-sister, with some help from the charming Ben Cooper, a horticultural student notably kind to old ladies. Naturally the adoptive parents are not welcoming - but does their hostility conceal a tendency to murder those who get in their way? Fran's conclusions may not tally with those of the police. As you'd expect, the story, pacy and amusingly written, slips down well. My only reservation is that the young people never seem sufficiently young. Fran is really rather too civilised and highly educated - would any girl of her age know sufficient about Fidelio to relate it to her own life? And she never swears, rarely uses the lingo of the streets. Much as I want to relate to Ganesh, Fran's Hindu partner in crime, isn't he really a nice middle-class white lad with an Asian name? I'm happier with Meredith and Markby: I rather think Ann Granger is too.
Judith Cutler
SAVING GRACE Janie Bolitho (Constable £16.99hbk)
Dr.Grace Cornell is waiting for a trial to begin. The trial of the man who tried to abduct her. The trial is what Hitchcock called a Macguffin. It's actually irrelevant, something to hang the plot on. However, there is no real plot. What there is, is close psychological examination of the characters. Their memories, their emotions, and their reasoning. Above all this is a book about people. One of the most over used phrases by critics has been 'this is a book about the human condition.' just for once I'll use it. Wonderful stuff. Buy it.
John Orum
SHERLOCK HOLMES AND THE RUNNING NOOSE, Donald Thomas (Macmillan, £16.99hbk)
I found this a little disappointing - but then I expected to. No, I do actually like Donald's fiction. 'Red Flowers for Lady Blue' was brilliant, I thought; he has a great skill for putting believable people down on paper. His characterisation is superb, and the atmosphere of 'Red Flowers' was brilliantly conceived. The trouble is, like many; I grew up with Holmes and Watson. Even now I have a large facsimile edition of the Strand versions complete with drawings, a paperback with all the stories minus pictures, and any number of little collectable versions in hardback and paperback. I treasure them all, and each is very well-thumbed. When I was young, I absorbed these tales with delight, not only for the excellence of Holmes' deductive genius, nor for the technical brilliance of the writing which was, to my mind, an example of conciseness which many modern writers would do well to emulate, but also for the sheer pleasure of learning how England was at a time of unparalleled change. We see the move from candlepower to electricity, from horse-drawn carriages to motor vehicles, from the 'struggle for Africa' and colonial wars to the immolation of the Great War. This, I think, is where I had a problem with Donald Thomas' book. I just didn't get that authentic feel for the time. Perhaps it's just proof that you can't drop yourself into a different era; maybe all historical writing is solely a reflection of our own times, but I'd contend that GM Fraser's brilliant creation Flashman does indeed give you an insight into the feelings, motivations and thoughts of people in the Victorian world. I didn't get the same feeling with this. Having said that, the short stories are all well crafted, the writing is convincing, and Homes himself is almost up for comparison with the original - but not quite. Yet surely this is the trouble with taking on someone else's work. It is easy to try to copy a writer's style, but next to impossible to pull it off so that impartial readers would be fooled into thinking that they were reading a rediscovered original. Are the stories worth reading? Yes. Suspend disbelief and look at them as stand-alone tales and you'll find them oddly pleasing. Largely this is because Donald has taken actual crimes and criminals, and gently inserted Holmes into them. By doing so, Donald has been able to give us some intriguing insights into the facts of the Crippen case and Oscar Wilde's too (although having read Donald's accusation on page 11 that Wilde used to steal other people's epigrams, I was struck with a twinge of pain when on page 15 I read a line of line of dialogue which I first read in Rumpole some twenty years ago. Still, the best authors can imagine a concept to be new which, unknown to them, they read elsewhere many years before. But back to the point). There are many characters who deserve a greater airing: the swindlers Benson and Kurr, the frankly weird Samuel Herbert Dougal, the curious case of Alfred John Monson and Edward Scott, the vicious serial killer George Joseph Smith, and the very mad Dr Neil Cream, and reading about them here makes them somehow seem more real than simply looking through the pages of 'Famous Trails' or 'Famous Trials of Marshall Hall'. Yes, I'd certainly be happy to recommend people to read this, especially because it gives an idea of how some criminals may have appeared - but not because it's really Sherlock Holmes. I'm afraid there is an imposter here. In summary: interesting, well written, imaginatively conceived, it is; Conan Doyle it ain't.
Mike Jecks
SHOEDOG George P. Pelecanos (Serpent's Tail, £10.00tbp)
A shark must always move forward or it dies. Knowing that can be confusing because there are men that must always move on, too, and they aren't always sharks. They may swim in the same sea, and sometimes they may drift and for a time they may settle, but either way they take whatever that big of sea of life may bring them without going hunting. That's how Constantine comes to be sitting in the get-away car on the edge of Washington DC, while a couple of guys with shotguns and ankle pieces are inside acquiring the liquor store takings. Now George P Pelecanos knows a little about the liquor store business - the owners could be Jews or gentiles, Irish or Koreans, whoever they are they manage to take a lot of cash out of their neighbourhood. Unfortunately for the would-be alternative possessor of that money the owners also tend to aware of the risks they run - they could be wearing bullet-proof jackets under their coveralls, that newspaper on the counter they never have the time to read might also be concealing their sawn-offs kept so conveniently to hand. In fact, getting hold of that cash can take a lot of planning. Now Constantine has been drifting, so it is just chance that Polk has given him a lift, and it is just chance that it is the right time of year for Polk to go and ask for some money he thinks is owing to him. What ain't chance is that Grimes in his beltway mansion has thought of a way to get hold of that cash and get rid of his old friend Polk when his old Korean War buddy comes calling. You think I'm just throwing names at you there? What about Rudolf and Weiner and Valdez and Diane? They all have lives and hopes, too. Which makes what is really a caper something darker. No matter what you hope or expect a lot of people are not going to come to out of it undamaged. They are not going to come out of it at all. Those that do, though, will not want to stay in the life, so they are going to need another occupation to pay the rent. Reader, George P Pelecanos knows a little about the retail business. Learn from him. It could save your life.
Les Hurst
Shooting in the Dark, John Baker. Orion, £9.99
I dare say the editor will forgive John Baker for almost pinching our original title. After all it's not the first time it's happened. John's more entitled to it than most, anyway, having supported the magazine from the outset. Which makes it all the more pleasing that he's been snapped up by Orion, the UK's best crime fiction publishing stable, hopefully at great benefit to his wallet and with great exposure of his talents. Shooting in the Dark is the fifth in the excellent Sam Turner series and certainly sustains the excitement for his long-term fans, even if it is still short of the masterpiece which will push John Baker into the top league of British crime fiction writers. For those who have not been converted to Sam Turner's cause, he is one of the most genial of private eyes as well as one of the most reliably and pleasantly stereotypical. Gnarled, frequently beaten by life as well as the York winters, but never defeated. Add to that an unreconstructed womaniser, a reforming alcoholic, a long-time champion of Bob Dylan and all things good in rock music, and a person much given to espousing hopeless causes with a tenacity which must even surprise him at times. Throw in a good supporting cast, as John Baker does regularly, and you have most of the ingredient of a best-selling detective novel, providing you can mix it all up in a strong plot. And that, sadly, is where Shooting in the Dark falls just short.
The story starts in the best traditions of the private eye genre. Beautiful woman approaches Sam ands seeks his help. She feels she is being followed, with the emphasis on feels, because when you are blind it is difficult to be too sure. She has an older sister who also thinks she is being followed. She is meant to be meeting Sam as well but fails to make the appointment. Sam is initially convinced by the blind woman's good looks rather more than her story, but is won over more entirely when the older sister is found dead. Sure enough someone has it in for both the sisters, and the task for Sam is to figure out who, and why, before the killer succeeds. Naturally, the book raises many of the familiar issues about the vulnerability of a blind person, especially one being victimised for no apparent reason. There's a lot of whimsical philosophising on life from Sam and his sidekicks JD and Geordie, which contrasts starkly with the blacker contemplations of the killer as he plans his next murder, and indulges his sado-masochistic activities with his partner. It's all very convincing, but sadly short of being entirely satisfying. I am still sure John will launch the truly big one at some point, and I will keep adding to my Sam Tuner collection in that hope.
Bob Cartwright
SIDESWIPE Charles Willeford, (No Exit Press, £4.99pbk)
Third of the four Hoke Mosely novels and a little like Joseph Wambaugh - beginning with a series of seemingly everyday happenings until you realise there is a story underway. But here you have the trademark Willeford, quirky characters: Stanley Sinkiewicz, retired line painter from the Ford production line with his sure-fire technique of dealing with vicious dogs; Troy Louden the well-read psychopath; Dale Forrest the disfigured model and James Freitas-Smith, the non-objective painter, to name a few. Mosely has a little nervous breakdown, like you do, and takes time-out from the Miami Police Department to manage a small hotel for his father. Life's absurdities and ugliness soon interfere with this little scheme as he is asked to investigate thefts from apartments and his objective of an 'uncomplicated life' starts to elude him. "No job's safer than Homicide, Mosely," his Commander - Bill Henderson - reminds him, "When you report to the scene, the victim's already dead and the killer's long gone. Or he's still there crying and saying he didn't mean to do it." So many social questions are examined in the process that it is a wonder Willeford managed to deal with it all in under 300 pages. There is no sense of cramming; exposition or hurry yet he covers diverse issues like cooking and cleaning; Ethiopian horse flies; recognising and dealing with Bulimia; lack of trust in long-time marriages; child abuse; painting; whether pregnant women should drink strong coffee; how to deal with prison psychologists and much more. The key event among this welter of human interest is the terrible robbery planned by Troy Louden. The ruthless cynicism he uses to carry it through, exploiting the ensemble of people he has assembled to help him, is staggering. This is a thought-provoking book with some characters you are unlikely to forget in a hurry. He opens with two quotes: "Life is an effort that deserves a better cause," and "There's a lot of bastards out there." Alas, Sergeant Willeford will write no more but No Exit Press are to be congratulated in reprinting many of his books - he is truly an author for our time.
Martin Spellman
SMALL CHANGE, Jerry Raine (The Do-Not Press £6.99.)
Small Change is the sequel to Small Time, named for protagonist Chris Small, and while it isn't necessary to have read the first book, its title gives an important clue to the type of milieu we are involved in here. No big scams or international conspiracies, just some rather pathetic characters moving through the London suburbs in search of money or misguided revenge. Under-achiever Chris is working six days a week running an off-licence for a skin flint boss, his misery compounded when his one room flat is broken into. An encounter with a good looking girl seems to offer the possibility of more money and romance when she ropes him in as her blackjack playing partner, but of course things are not going to be that simple. Not when he has someone looking to bust a few of his limbs as revenge for a death or two in Chris's past. Raine's characters are blandly authentic, talking of TV programmes and looking for something better as they stumble from situation to situation. Put like that, it all seems to have the potential to be boring, but no, it is all rather weirdly compelling in its low key way, something to clear your literary palate if you are suffering a surfeit of cops, psychos and terrorists.
Calum Macleod
SMOKE IN THE WIND, Peter Tremayne, (Headline £17.99hbk)
This was a rare treat for me, because I've never before encountered Peter Tramayne's work, although I have heard quite a lot about it. For those who are new to him, Tremayne is a specialist in very early medireview Ireland, which means the middle of the seventh century AD. Tremayne has made this period his own in the same way that Ellis Peters took over Shropshire a few centuries later, and Tremayne writes with a sharpness and verve about the frankly strange methods of judicial process in this era that makes you want to read on. This story is set, strangely, away from Ireland. His heroine, Sister Fidelma, is travelling to visit the Archbishop of Canterbury with her sidekick Brother Eadulf, when their ship is forced into port. They find themselves in another Celtic land, Wales, but a place with a very different atmosphere to that which they left behind them. Eadulf is no Celt, but a Saxon, and in Wales Saxons are known only for murder and rape. Their warlike attitude is known all over the land, and Fidelma and he must win the trust of all those whom they meet. It would be easier if it weren't for the fact that a monastery has been emptied of all its brethren. Entirely empty, all wonder what could have happened to the men who lived there, until some brothers are found murdered nearby, with Saxon weapons at their side. And then Fidelma and Eadulf find a dead Saxon - but bafflingly, he's concealed in another man's coffin. Still, people have confirmed seeing a Saxon warship, so most are convinced that this must be a Saxon crime. Yet there are some confusing problems which make Fidelma wonder. There is a dead girl, whose murderer was caught at her side; and a strange group of outlaws with a highly educated leader. What connection can there be between these three? It takes Fidelma all her skill and intelligence to make a connection. The plot is tortuous in the extreme, and the history, although always on the page, is never obtrusive. Tremayne handles his characters skilfully, and he knows how to keep the reader guessing until the very last few pages. Of course, once Fidelma and Eadulf have solved the riddles in Wales, they still have to make their way to Canterbury. Personally, I'd hire a boat and get back to Ireland, but no doubt Tremayne intends to give them a harder time of it. I look forward to the next in the series, and finding out how the tribal politics make their lives still more hectic in the future!
Mike Jecks
THE SNIPER Nicholas Rhea (Constable £16.99hbk)
Roberthorpe is a small sleepy village in Yorkshire. The sort of place where nothing happens. Until, that is, an old man is shot in the church porch. DS Mark Pemberton is called in. The major question is why should anyone want to murder a harmless old man? As the investigation gets under way the victim's past is revealed and it is apparent that he was far from harmless. What is more curious is that the killer has been seen by several witnesses but is still hard to track down. Then two more murders take place in different parts of the country. It is obvious that it is the same killer using the same gun. But he looks different to the original sighting. If it is the same man, what is his agenda? When all is revealed, the killer has the last word, and it is obvious that there will be more killings to come. A gripping story well told. A gem. Recommended.
John Orum
SOMETHING WILD, Linda Davies (Headline £10.00hbk)
Sarah Jensen is a London investment banker turned criminal investigator: a beautiful woman, part Cheyenne Indian, "a walking incitement to lust" according to one of her colleagues. The story starts with her galloping to save the life of a man on a runaway horse, and ends with her staked out, metaphorically speaking, as the tethered goat to catch a serial rapist. In between there is the romance: with John Redford, an American rock star who, with his splendid body and love of space and horses, is a worthy mate for our protagonist. As a result of a one-night stand in the wilds of Wyoming - the lovers consuming their passions in a tent surrounded by patrolling grizzly bears - a child is born. However, Sarah, returning to London, fiercely independent, refusing to be ensnared by love, keeps little Georgie's very existence a secret, most particularly from his father, even when Redford arrives in England to invest his considerable fortune and Sarah is employed to investigate his credentials. The love story is played out against a colourful background of financial shenanigans in the City, of a stalker who progresses to threats against Sarah's baby, of steamy rock concerts and the odd spot of adultery. All this with pleasant diversions as the lovers, together or singly, wander the streets of London and New York or Paris and the waterways of Venice. From the opening sentence there is a promise of sex and violence: a novel for the 21st century. Even the acknowledgements end on a modern note: "Here's to research!" But the book is neither awash with bodily fluids nor is it laid back. Something Wild falls between two stools: Emma Lathen out of Mills and Boon, and as such is an international bestseller, according to the blurb.
Gwen Moffat
THE SWITCH Sandra Brown (Piatkus £5.99pbk)
A surprise novel to emerge from the Piatkus talent which normally promotes home-grown talent. This book feels like a best-seller, looks like a best-seller but, sadly, doesn't quite read as one. The 'attractive twins' concept may be tiresome but is extremely well handled by Brown so the identity-swapping twins don't quite fall into the tedious mode of lesser novelists. Mix feisty twins, IVF, a Native American hero and a religious cult with a heady dash of murder and you have a fast paced action thriller full of blood, guts and emotion. Not as good as it should be but still a good read - especially when Brown studiously avoids stereotypes and delivers good characters and an exciting plot.
Fiona Shoop
THE TAKE, Graham Hurley (Orion £9.99hbk)
Graham Hurley's first novel, Turnstone, was well received and in The Take he returns once again with DI Joe Faraday, a bird-watching fictional cop. There's a lot going on in Portsmouth. Faraday's Management Assistant, Vanessa Parry, has been killed in a head-on collision. DS Paul Winter's wife, Joannie, has been diagnosed with inoperable cancer and has only a couple more months to live. A disgraced gynaecologist has gone missing and it is slowly emerging that most of his patients have been crippled during his operations. And a serial Donald Duck flasher is attacking women down by the harbour. Plenty for Joe Faraday to get his teeth into, you might think. But the DI still has the time to entertain his deaf son on a visit from France, carry on a platonic relationship with one woman and an intensely passionate one with another, and take time off to wander through nature with his binoculars to make sure he doesn't miss the aggressive antics of the local turnstones or the first churring of a pair of breeding nightjars. One of the problems with The Take is that Joe Faraday really isn't a strong enough character to carry the novel. He is overshadowed by the more interesting and driven figure of DS Paul Winter, who carries his own pain and incomprehension into a vigilante campaign against the gynaecologist. If you like police procedurals you'll probably like this. Hurley is an accomplished writer and he'll keep you turning the pages right to the end. But don't expect anything new here. This ground has all been covered before by writers like John Harvey and Ian Rankin, both of them more experienced novelists. So although there is much to admire in The Take, there is also a lot which is inadequate and frustrating. Graham Hurley needs a new subject. These cops, and others very like them, are already available in many other novels. A writer with Hurley's gifts shouldn't waste his talents on imitations. When he finds his subject we can look forward to a novel of real strength and substance.
John Baker
UNTIMELY GRAVES Marjorie Eccles, (Constable Crime £16.99hbk)
A soundly written, character-led novel which investigates how far people will go before they snap. What links a drug dealer, mysterious murdered woman and the high-profile killing of the bursar at Lavenstock College? Or are the three murders unrelated? Detective Superintendent Mayo and Inspector Moon with a notable supporting cast of characters try to solve the crimes and not be taken in by appearances. After all, little old women of eighty have been known to be murderers, haven't they? This is a charming book which could benefit from a slightly faster pace but the jigsaw of characters is perfectly fitted and I hope to see more of the younger members, Cleo and the artistic Tony in the future. Billed as being a 'novel in the popular DS Gil Mayo series', I felt that it needed more concentration on Mayo and Moon for those of us who have not encountered them before. We are told that Mayo is desirable but I had no idea of his age or looks which was disappointing. This book is well worth reading for the complex characters, something which Eccles handles perfectly.
Fiona Shoop
VIOLETS ARE BLUE, James Peterson (Headline £16.99)
The mastermind from Roses Are Red returns in this aptly titled sequel. And he has detective Alex Cross on the run from the east to the west coast following a series of so called 'vampire' murders. So, it's two cases in one for Alex, but are they connected? Patterson is one of those extremely popular writers who also writes extremely good thrillers. I have everything he's written. Truth is, I read them too fast. Take your time and enjoy.
Mark Timlin
WHO KILLED ROGER ACKROYD? Pierre Bayard, (Fourth Estate, £6.99pbk)
Immediately after thankfully setting down Isle of Dogs, I picked up the book I'd selected as my next review. I'd picked this as second because I thought it would be dull, and I wanted something fun or exciting first. Thus Isle of Dogs. We can all make mistakes! Pierre Bayard has written a careful dissection of Agatha Christie's book with the same title, with the aim of showing that the Christie ending was, in fact, wrong in her ending. It should, by rights, be a cold, dull read, but instead we're treated to a brilliant investigation using all other crime fiction, police techniques and psychoanalysis to come to a fresh conclusion. Christie's original book (a Poirot mystery) was excellent in that it was told by a first-person narrator, always a difficult viewpoint for an author which can get in the way of good storytelling, and - sorry folks, if you haven't read her book yet, stop reading here because I'm about to give away the ending! - then the writer confesses to the murder. Or so one imagines. Pierre Bayard poo-poos this scenario. As he says, few confession statements can be treated seriously nowadays. For that reason he rejects the confession and shows that it was someone else. Poirot got it wrong. But that's the final few pages. The main thing is how Bayard reaches his conclusion. He takes apart all of Christie's works, categorising each type of plot, studying the characters, the motives and the means. I am by no means an academic, as I suspect M. Bayard is, but at least I felt I could follow the logic of his story. And it's as tortuous as The Long Goodbye'. The only trouble is, of course, that his startling (well, you have to use words like that in a review!) conclusions are plain wrong. At the end of the day, whether an analyst and reader likes the author's ending is not the point. The story has to stand or fall by the skill with which the story is told and how well it is plotted. That means the novelist him- or herself bears the sole responsibility. Millions of people who have read Roger Ackroyd have been delighted by the story itself and by the way it was told. That, and the fact that the book is still being sold, is the final proof of good writing. Still, nice work, Pierre!
Mike Jecks
WILL POWER, Judith Cutler (Hodder & Stoughton, £17.99hbk)
Will Power is the latest in the series featuring DS Kate Power. Back on the Fraud Squad but still finding her feet in Birmingham. DS Power is still understaffed, under-funded and under the leadership of an antagonistic boss who is also extremely jealous of her relationship. While DI Graham's marriage is keeping him from Kate, her new case means that she is neglecting him. A simple case of a forged will soon expands to include a murder and a further investigation into what could have been an unnatural death a generation ago. On top of this Kate is still trying to sort out her feelings towards DI Graham and the state of their relationship. Not having read any of the earlier books in the series I found Will Power to be an easy read. There was noting outstanding or remarkable out the book, however it was an enjoyable read. It was nice to see that the author has not fallen into the trap of making her protagonist a downtrodden police officer. Kate Powers definitely has a backbone and knows how to stand up for herself. Furthermore the plot and the storyline flow well together. While it is not one of those books that will compel you to finish reading it at one sitting, it is certainly worth reading.
Ayo Onatade
WRIT OF EXECUTION Perri O' Shaughnessy (Piatkus £17.99hbk)
Nina Reilly is a lawyer in Las Vegas. A widow, she has a young son to bring up and an unsatisfactory relationship with her detective lover, Paul. Into this comes a client who doesn't want to reveal her name. The new client wants to get married to the man she sat next to in the casino where she won the jackpot on a slot machine--in excess of $7m dollars! The thing is she doesn't want any publicity. Her ex father-in-law is following her, because he believes, wrongly, that she killed his son. To add to her problems, the man who had sat on the machine just before her, leaving it to go to the toilet, thinks the money should be his. Nina and her client find themselves in court defending her against a civil case brought by the client's father-in-law suing her for everything she has, including the jackpot win. The client and anyone who has contact with her find themselves in danger from a mysterious killer, who is murdering his way to the jackpot. The resolution to both cases is ingenious. The story is well told with a cracking pace, superb characterisation, good dialogue, and a well-researched ingenious plot. What more could you ask?
John Orum
WORKING GIRLS, Maureen Carter (Flambard £7.99pbk)
A schoolgirl prostitute is picked up by a man she perceives as a gent, driving an expensive car. Hours later she is found by a pond in the grounds of a local school, brutally murdered. D.C. Be Morris is put on the case. She is an engaging and convincing character. Maureen Carter is a successful journalist and this is a police procedural with a conscience. Bevy's investigations take her into the world of teenage vice and its roots among dysfunctional families on Birmingham's poorest estates. She tries to befriend the young prostitutes, and has real empathy with Vicki, a school friend of Michelle, the murder victim. She believes that Vicki knows much more about the crime than she is letting on. Then Vicki disappears, and Bev feels she is getting nowhere. Another of the street girls is badly beaten up and this is followed by a second murder, in almost identical circumstances to 0the first. Bev discovers that a pimp named Charlie Hawes runs most of the girls. He is a sadistic monster, who is terrorising the girls into giving Bev misleading information. Bev becomes convinced that Hawes is the murderer, and bringing him to justice becomes an obsession, to the extent that she is inclined to disregard other leads. The plot thickens still further when there is a third murder. This time the victim is not a prostitute, but the schoolgirl daughter of one of Bev's colleagues. From this point the pace quickens, leading to a predictable climax in which Bev almost loses her own life. I find this scene, in which Bev finally discovers the identity of the murderer, disappointing. I simply do not believe that a hardened, brutal criminal would describe his crimes in detail to a policewoman he is about to kill. This is not a pleasant story, but Maureen Carter writes fluently and her characters are all very well rounded. I find the street-sharp wit a little overdone but I am sure Bev Morrisss will be back fighting crime in Birmingham before long.
Maureen Carlyle
