Straying off crime's beaten track

CRIME BEAT:RECENTLY PROMOTED to DCI, Lynda La Plante's series heroine, Anna Travis, returns in Blood Line (Simon & Schuster, £10.99) to head up a murder enquiry when a suspicious pool of blood is discovered in the apartment which a missing young man, Alan Rawlins, shares with his fiancee, Tina Brooks. Initial reports suggest that Rawlins was such a sweet-natured man that no one would have any motive to kill him, but was Alan Rawlins too good to be true?

Weaving DCI Travis’s domestic and professional tribulations into a fast-paced narrative, La Plante blends police procedural and CSI-style investigation to create an engrossing tale.Travis is an astute policewoman who is also battling incipient depression brought on by the murder of her own fiancee. Tough but vulnerable, she struggles to establish her professional authority while trying to shake off the shackles of her overbearing boss, DCS Langton, who also happens to be a former lover. La Plante’s prose is bland but entirely functional and she invests the plot with a host of twists and turns on the way to an entirely satisfying climax.

Stella Rimington's Rip Tide (Bloomsbury, £12.99) is the sixth in the Liz Carlyle series from the former Director-General of MI5. When a British-born citizen is captured off the coast of Somalia in the company of pirates, Intelligence Officer Carlyle leads an investigation that opens as an enquiry into piracy, but soon evolves into a race against time to prevent a terrorist threat on British soil.

Carlyle has much in common with Anna Travis: her professionalism is sharply contrasted with the uncertainties of her personal life, and she too is the subject of unwelcome attention from her boss. The story ranges from London to Athens and on to the Horn of Africa, but while Rip Tideincorporates the epic sweep and global concerns expected of a contemporary spy thriller, the lack of ambition in Rimington's prose belies the John Le Carré comparisons her Carlyle novels have garnered. There's also a lack of the kind of insight into the basics of a spy's trade that a reader is entitled to expect from a former director-general of MI5, while the novel's big twist will be glaringly apparent to any regular reader of the crime genre from a very early point in the story.

More deserving of the Le Carré comparisons is Charles Cumming's fifth novel, The Trinity Six (Harper, £12.99). As a young man, Cumming was recruited by MI6, and his experience working for the Secret Intelligence Service is so palpable here that Cumming can at one point even afford to allow his hero, Dr Sam Gaddis, to wander into post-modern territory near the Ferris wheel made famous by Orson Welles in the classic movie The Third Man. An academic by trade, Dr Gaddis is sucked into a delightfully old-fashioned Cold War tale when his attempt to pay the bills by writing a blockbuster about the current Russian president attracts the attention of a variety of spooks, spies and stone-cold killers. While the story is briskly told, Cumming is sufficiently strong on characterisation, plot and a sense of place to create the kind of claustrophobic quality associated with veteran authors such as Le Carré and Len Deighton. Littered with the kind of deftly dropped allusions to spy craft that Stella Rimington's novel lacks, The Trinity Sixis a timely novel that is nonetheless rooted firmly in the past, both in terms of its story's backdrop and its obvious affection for the genre.

John Hart's The Last Childwas one of the finest crime novels of 2010. Hart's latest offering, Iron House (John Murray, £12.99), centres on Michael, who we first meet as a trusted advisor to one of New York's most ruthless crime bosses. When Michael kills the old man, he unleashes a backlash of violence and goes on the run with his pregnant girlfriend, Elena. Iron Houseis a more rounded novel than that conventional opening suggests, however, and Hart delves deep into Michael's psychology as he explores a past in which Michael escaped a horrific life in an orphanage, in the process leaving behind his sickly brother, Julian. Despite the many flashbacks, Hart maintains a propulsive momentum, blending tension with outbreaks of deftly executed violence to give the tale both pace and punch, but what marks Hart out from his peers is his facility for a kind of hardboiled poetry. While Iron Houseis ostensibly a novel about the travails of a former and unrepentant killer, Hart is an author who combines power and depth as he shines a light into the darker recesses of the human psyche.

The Caller(Harvill Secker, £12.99) is Karin Fossum's 10th Inspector Sejer offering, and her 16th book overall, and it bears all the hallmarks of Fossum's usual, pleasingly idiosyncratic take on the crime novel. Here the Norwegian author takes a bead on the kind of crimes that tend to fly below most crime writers' radars; indeed, Inspector Sejer is exercised by a series of crimes that would barely merit an ASBO, and are hardly more than cruel pranks played on a number of vulnerable people. The philosophy behind the story appears to be a variation on zero tolerance, as the antagonist's pranks quickly escalate from the relatively harmless to the potentially lethal, although when it comes, the explosion of violence Fossum depicts is of an entirely unconventional kind. Previously a prize-winning poet, Fossum's novels stray off the crime genre's beaten track in search of the profound, and rarely disappoint. A contemporary Patricia Highsmith, her offbeat obsession with the psychology of the criminal mind, and the human cost of criminal activity, pays off handsomely yet again.

Declan Burke is a journalist and crime writer. His latest novel, Absolute Zero Cool, is published by Liberties Press