Crimefile: Patricia Cornwell's At Risk is a shorter book than usual and doesn't feature her usual series protagonist, forensic scientist Dr Kay Scarpetta. Although a short novel - 180 double-spaced pages - it has quite a complicated plot. Detective Winston Garano is called back from a training course in Tennessee by district attorney Monique Lamont, only to be given a 20-year-old case involving the murder of a wealthy old woman.
It has never been solved, and Lamont believes that if Garano can come up with a solution it will serve to highlight her new crime initiative called "At Risk: any crime, any time". The publicity will also help in Lamont's attempt to run for governor of Massachusetts. Before Garano has started the investigation, Lamont is raped. He chances on the event and kills the assailant, but the act impinges on both their lives and on the case he has just begun looking into. This is Cornwell writing at the top of her form. It is a rich little feast of a book and will satisfy even the most demanding of readers.
Kathy Reichs has carved a niche for herself in Cornwell territory, and at this stage deserves to stand beside her as an equal. Her book, Break No Bones, does feature her series character, forensic archaeologist Temperance Brennan. She is conducting a field school on a site of prehistoric graves on Dewees, a barrier island north of Charlestown, South Virginia, when a decomposing body is found in a shallow grave. This one is a recent burial, the bone fresh and the vertebrae still connected by soft tissue, and Tempe, as she is called, cannot ignore these implications. As she attempts to piece together the evidence, a bullet - intended perhaps for her - puts her estranged husband, Pete, in hospital. Soon other bodies are discovered, and Tempe finds herself drawn into an investigation that involves the clandestine selling of human organs to unscrupulous buyers. Reichs is a confident writer, and her mix of an engrossing plot and forensic detail make for a quite brilliant read.
Red Leaves, by Thomas H Cook, is a suspense novel on the grand scale. Eric Moore is a happy man: he is well-off, has a comfortable home and a stable family life in a quiet town. Then one night his teenage son, Keith, is asked to babysit eight-year-old Amy Giordano, daughter of a neighbouring family. When Amy goes missing, Keith is the likeliest suspect, and suddenly Eric is put in the position of defending a son who, he realises, is less than an open book to him.
As the investigation proceeds, suspicion falls more and more on Keith, and both Amy's grief-stricken father and other members of the community are certain of his guilt. Unlike most novels of this type, there is no happy ending, but before I give the game away let me just finish by saying that the conclusion is as likely as any other. And the book shows that suspicion, like an acid, corrodes even the happiest of family lives. Highly recommended.
The Husband, by Dean Koontz, is also a novel of suspense; this time a wife is kidnapped and held for ransom. The difference between this and most kidnap thrillers is that the husband is not rich. He is landscape gardener Mitchell Rafferty, and when he gets the phone call asking for a two-million-dollar ransom he thinks that it is some form of sick joke. To show him that his wife's captors are deadly serious, an innocent bystander is shot dead. The book is an attempt to show what an ordinary man will undertake when he is placed in desperate circumstances, and it succeeds brilliantly. Rafferty is the everyman that all of us would like to be when placed in jeopardy, and he has 60 hours to show it. The pace of this story is frenetic and if one has to suspend incredulity at times, the overall narrative speed makes up for it. The Husband is a highly satisfying read.
Voices, by Arnaldur Indridason, is one in the Reykjavik Murder Mysteries series and has been translated from the Icelandic by Bernard Scudder. It features Detective Erlendur and his second-in-command, Sigurdur Oli, and it has that stolid, slow-moving aspect of most Nordic thrillers. It is the week before Christmas and in the dingy basement of a grand hotel in Reykjavik a doorman dressed as Santa Claus has been stabbed to death. Erlendur, glum and plodding, takes up residence in the hotel, much to the manager's displeasure, and sets about questioning the staff and the guests, many of whom are weird in the extreme. When he discovers the dead doorman's childhood secret, memories of his own troubled past arise to confront Erlendur. If you like your thrillers slow but masterfully written, then this one is for you.
Mark Billingham's Buried puts a new slant on the concept of child abuse as the motivating factor for down and dirty deeds. His series detective, Insp Tom Thorne, is on special assignment to the Kidnap Unit when he is given the case of the missing teenager Luke Mullen.
Mullen's father is a former hard-nosed policeman who put away many criminals in his time, so it is more than possible that the boy has been taken as a form of revenge. Given a list of possible suspects by the father, Thorne is intrigued by the omission of one particular man, a man who threatened Mullen at one time and is now a suspect in an unsolved murder. Thorne has to dig back into the past to solve the case, and before things come to a conclusion he finds himself in deadly danger. Buried is a fine read in as good a crop of thrillers as I've come across in a long time.
Vincent Banville is an author and critic
At Risk By Patricia Cornwell Little Brown, £12.99 Break No Bones By Kathy Reichs, Heinemann, £17.99 Red Leaves By Thomas H Cook, Quercus, £12.99 The Husband By Dean Koontz, HarperCollins, £17.99 Voices By Arnaldur Indridason Harvill Secker, £12.99 Buried By Mark Billingham Little, Brown, £12.99