There have been many famous plot lines in thriller fiction over the years. Conan Doyle came up with a few nifty ones, and Agatha Christie's Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? and E. C. Bentley's Trent's Last Case come to mind. It's not usual in the modern variety, however, to enthuse over a masterful and intricately worked story, action, dialogue, violence and sex being more to the liking of today's readers.
Michael Connelly, though, in his new novel, Blood Work, presents a super-duper plot structure, as elaborately built as a Chinese puzzle and as playful as a Joan Miro painting. Layers are peeled off, until one feels that a resolution has been achieved, but the final twist in the tail is as good as I've come across in many a year. Unfortunately, there are then another thirty or so pages to provide a Hollywood-type ending which I could well have done without, but what goes before that is absolutely scintillating.
Terry McCaleb is an ex-FBI agent so stressed that his heart has given out. Because of the fact that he has a rare blood type, he has to wait two years before being provided with a new one. He is told that the donor died in an accident, then her sister turns up and tells him that his benefactor was murdered and that her killer was never caught.
Feeling that he owes the dead girl a debt of gratitude, McCaleb sets out to find the murderer. The girl, Gloria, was shot in an apparently random killing, being in the wrong place at the wrong time when a small grocery store was in the process of being robbed.
Putting his expertise as a former agent to work, McCaleb soon works out that Gloria was in fact the victim of a serial killer. This large middle section of the book is highly fascinating, as what seem like trivial bits of information are correlated and fitted together to form a complete mosaic. Little surprises surface like pulse beats from our hero's new heart: a red herring revealed, a bullet matching up, McCaleb's rare blood type proving to be of great significance.
Perhaps one wonders at times how a man just six weeks after a heart transplant is able to undertake the strenuous schedule McCaleb sets himself, but such stirrings of disbelief soon subside as another strand in the plot is unravelled. And there are also other small nudgings to keep one entertained, such as McCaleb wearing a sweat shirt with "Robicheaux's Dock and Bait shop" written on it - a bow towards James Lee Burke's marvellous series featuring Cajun detective Dave Robicheaux, and a book about the serial killer The Poet being consulted - which, as fans of Connelly's will know, was written by the man himself.
It is difficult to say much more about the story, as there are so many marvellous twists and turns that to give even one away would be a major mistake. Connelly has already written five novels featuring his Los Angeles-based detective Harry Bosch, all of which are excellent - and The Concrete Blonde is a masterpiece of the genre.
Hopefully Harry will return, but in the meantime Blood Work is there to be savoured. And if you are wondering about the title, it is the term the FBI uses when referring to the efforts that go into catching serial killers. And horribly apt it is too.
Vincent Banville's most recent thriller is Death the Pale Rider
