ONE of the advantages of bestsellerdom, for the writer if not for the reader, is that once established he or she can pen almost any old thing and still manage to sell in the millions. John Grisham is the world's most widely read author, but his latest offering, The Partner (Century. £16.99 in UK), is fiction writing by numbers, or, like the child's colouring book, blocking in the picture to an ordained stereotype.
The partner of the title is Patrick Lanigan, the company a law firm, the McGuffin a sum of 590 million which Lanigan has misappropriated and disappeared with. Of course, he turns up again, instigating an elaborate scam whose ramifications would have sawn doubts even in Candide's credulity. Grisham's last book, The Runaway Jury, was a return to farm, after the awful The Rainmaker, so maybe he'll hit the button with every alternate volume. Skip one, read one: that's the ticket.
And he had better beware, for there's a new kid on the black. In The Tenth Justice (Hodder & Stoughtan, £10 in UK), young Brad Meltzer all of 26 has formulated a Grisham-like thriller that fairly crackles, having pace, confidence and velocity-charged story-telling. Fresh from law school, Ben Addison has a bright future ahead of him, but when he inadvertently leaks information about a pending court decision, he finds himself not alone fighting far that future, but for his very life. Meltzer, showing all the brashness of youth, takes no prisoners in his relentless charge towards plot resolution and, although he drops a number of clangers along the way, the overall result is highly satisfactory.
A new phenomenon I've noticed recently in crime fiction is the location-based yarn, the dust jacket proclaiming An Eddathorpe Mystery or A Lydmouth Mystery or some such. Raymond Flynn is the creator of seedy Eddathorpe, where in his third novel set there, A Fine Body of Men (Hodder & Stoughton, £16.99 in UK), D.I. Robert Graham has to wrestle with the finding of a body on the beach, a sniping campaign by a rival for promotion, and an unsympathetic CID chief. Flynn, an ex-policeman himself, writes a laid-back, tongue-in-cheek prose that paces his plot nicely; his hero is all too human; and the realism of the setting and of the people who inhabit it gives an underplayed, down-beat air to the action that makes it believable. Recommended.
The Lover of the Grave (Hodder & Stoughton, £16.99 in UK), by Andrew Taylor, is located in and around the village of Lydmouth. It has an old-fashioned air to it and is in the farm of the traditional English mystery thriller. A local teacher is found dead, dangling from a Hanging Tree near Lydmouth with his trousers around his ankles. D.I. Thornhill investigates, aided, albeit unwillingly, by journalist Jill Francis. Affairs in the small public school where the man taught prove to be murky, a Peeping Tom is preying an the villagers, and love or something like it, is stirring in the breasts of our hero and heroine. A slow but nicely satisfying read.
Mare or less in the same vein is Margaret Yorke's Act of Violence (Little, Brawn, £15.99 in UK). Set in the quiet market town of Mickleburgh, the book recounts the consequences of an unruly escapade by a group of schoolboys, when a man is killed and witnesses to the event prove unwilling to offer evidence. Building to a highly-charged climax, it shows how the placid surface of a community can hide beneath it the seeds of catastrophe. Well-judged and expertly written.
John Straley sets his thrillers in Sitka, Alaska, and has built up quite a reputation on the strength of this two former novels. In his latest, The Music of What Happens (Gallancz, £16.99 in UK), he has his private investigator Cecil Younger helping out a friend, Priscilla DeAngelo, who believes there is a conspiracy afoot to take her son away from her. Straley deals in eccentric characters, very bizarre situations and poorly realised plot lines. I find his writing arch and pretentious, and his wandering off into highways and byways irritates rather than charms. Nat far me although I liked his first novel, The Woman Who Married a Bear.
Birdland (Hodder & Stoughton, £16.99 in UK), by Eric Adams, harks back to Hitchcock's film The Birds, especially in its setting in the California coastal town of Bodega Bay. That's where Katie Jacobs goes in order to search for her long-lost brother, Vincent. Soon secrets begin to unravel, shocking deeds are perpetrated, and old scares surface to be settled. Over the top in places, the book still succeeds in raising a hackle or two.
Finally to David Martin's new chiller, Cul-de-sac (Headline, £16.99 in UK), in which the hero, Teddy Camel, has to journey into the hell of the eponymous cul-de-sac in order to rescue his friend Annie Milton. More horror novel than mystery thriller, the book should not be read alone or when cutting up meat. Enough said.