CrimefileIn I Saw You, Julie Parsons has crafted a fine novel of suspense. Retired policeman Michael McLoughlin is haunted by a case he investigated where a young woman was brutalised and then murdered.
He met the girl's mother, Margaret, and actually conspired with her to kill the perpetrator of the deed. Margaret then left Dublin for the Antipodes, but now she is back, equally haunted by the deed she has committed.
As a favour to a friend, McLoughlin agrees to look into the death by drowning of another young woman. Was it an accident, suicide, or perhaps murder? Two dysfunctional families bounce off one another when Margaret meets the mother of the drowned girl, with our policeman friend caught in the middle. Madness, revenge and atonement all intermingle, as the pace of the novel increases towards a violent and bloody climax. Julie Parsons has written a page-turner that will keep the reader fascinated right to the very end.
Patricia Cornwell is an old hand at writing page-turners also, and in Book of the Dead she has come up with another one worthy of that description. The eponymous book in question is the morgue log, the ledger in which cases are entered by hand. Forensic pathologist Kay Scarpetta has a number to enter: a woman incinerated in her multi-million-dollar beach house, the body of a young abused boy found in a bog, and the nude, mutilated corpse of a 16-year-old tennis star discovered near the Piazza Navona in Rome.
Scarpetta has never had to deal with such a baffling string of crimes before, and it takes her, and her associates: partner Benton, niece Lucy and investigator Pete Marino, all their time and patience to come up with solutions. A psycho with the wonderful name of Will Rambo is responsible for most of the violence - I'm not giving anything away here, as he is named at the very start of the book - but there is a lot more depth to the work as the book thunders on to its conclusion. Nice one Scarpetta, and nice one Cornwell.
DEATH AND DECEPTION arrive in a lighter mode in Ruth Dudley Edwards's Murdering Americans. This one again features Baroness (Jack) Troutbeck, member of the British House of Lords and Mistress of St Martha's College in Cambridge. Described as an insensitive and tactless human battering ram, Jack takes up an invitation to become a Distinguished Visiting Professor on an American campus.
She is immediately out of step with her colleagues there, and the fun is fast and furious as she attempts, unsuccessfully, to blend in. She also becomes intrigued by the fact that the late Provost of Freeman State University died under mysterious circumstances. To that end she hires a private eye, who imagines he is Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer, to investigate the case. Murdering Americans, as well as being a mystery thriller, also casts a bleary satiric eye on the institutionalised correctness of American academia. Lovely stuff.
LYNDA LA PLANTE is just about an industry in herself, what with films, television and books. In her new novel, Clean Cut, she reunites DCI James Langton and DI Anna Travis. As the story kicks off, Langton is in pursuit of a gang of illegal immigrants when he is attacked and almost fatally wounded. Anna helps to nurse him back to health, and puts up with his desperate determination to find his would-be murderer.
Then she is assigned to a new case, where a quiet studious woman is raped and killed. To Anna's surprise, she discovers a link with Langton's attack, and soon she is under threat from the gang that wounded him. Clean Cut is not one for the faint-hearted, as the violence is fairly graphic, but it is thought-provoking and fast-paced, and it does keep one reading.
AS THE BLURB says, The Dust of Death, by Paul Charles, is the first in a new series set in Donegal by the acclaimed author of the DI Christy Kennedy thrillers. It features Inspector Starrett of the Irish Serious Crimes Unit, and it begins with the discovery of a crucified man in the Second Federation Church in the town of Ramelton.
The pastor of the church is the most obvious suspect, but, as people who read detective stories well know, the most obvious suspect is not always the perpetrator of the dastardly deed. So it proves, as Starrett and his young team begin their investigations. On the surface unexceptional, the town has many dark secrets to hide, and quite a few of them are revealed before a conclusion is reached.
Patterson and Roughan's You've Been Warned is more a gothic horror story than a conventional thriller. Kristin Burns is a talented young photographer who is working as a nanny for the wealthy Turnbull family in Manhattan. She is having an affair with Michael Turnbull, the father of young Dakota and Sean, and the husband of supercilious Penley.
She is haunted by a recurring dream of murders in a hotel called the Falcon, and begins to see dead people from her childhood walking about the streets. The murders in the hotel become a reality when she sees bodies in body bags being brought out, but yet there is nothing in the newspapers about them. Life becomes more and more terrifying for her until eventually a bloody climax is brought about. Not one to read in the dog hours of the night.
FINALLY THERE IS Paris Noir (Serpent's Tail, £8.99), a collection of tales by British, American and French authors edited by Maxim Jakubowski, who owns London's Murder One mystery bookshop. Authors include Jerome Charyn, Stella Duffy, Michael Moorcock and Jason Starr, and what the stories have in common is that they are all set in Paris. They reveal the dark underbelly of that city, the shadows that fester beneath the City of Light.
Vincent Banville is a writer and critic
I Saw You Julie Parsons Macmillan, €12.99 Book of the Dead Patricia Cornwell Little, Brown, £12.99 Murdering Americans Ruth Dudley Edwards Poisoned Pen Press, £15.95 Clean Cut Lynda La Plante Simon & Schuster, £17.99) The Dust of Death Paul Charles Brandon, €22.99 You've Been Warned Patterson and Roughan Headline, £18.99 Paris Noir Edited by Maxim Jakubowski Serpent's Tail, £8.99