Paperback CrimefileVincent Banville reviews: Therapy By Jonathan Kellerman Headline, £10.99; Like a Charm Ed. Karin Slaughter, Arrow,.99; The Golden Door By Kerry Jamieson, Hodder, £10.99; Storming Heaven By Kyle Mills, Coronet, £6.99; Blowtorch By Pat O'Keefe New English Library, £6.99; The Continental Op By Dashiell Hammett, Orion, £6.99.
Therapy is the 19th novel to feature clinical psychologist Alex Delaware, and it shows why the series gives no sign of flagging. Called in by Det Milo Sturgis to help him unravel the brutal murder of a young couple found dead in a car on a lonely road in the hills above Los Angeles, Delaware is intrigued by the fact that, although both of the dead people have a single gunshot wound to the head, the young woman has also been impaled by a metal spike. Dark territory indeed. The dead man is soon identified, and it turns out that he has been the patient of a celebrity psychologist named Dr Mary Lou Koppel. She, however, is loath to share the murdered man's secrets with Delaware, which forces him to dig all the deeper to solve the case. With Jonathan Kellerman, one is in the hands of a true professional, and here he brings his readers safely home through a highly complicated but thoroughly enjoyable storyline.
Like a Charm is a series of stories, 16 in all, edited by Karin Slaughter, linked by the connecting conceit of a bracelet bearing, yes, 16 charms. Beginning at the start of the 19th century with a tale of an anthropomorphic bear by the book's editor, the stories move backward and forward in time, while maintaining the jewelled contact. Two Irish writers are represented: Emma Donoghue, with a dark episode set in Louisiana, and John Connolly, with a piece about a man suffering from writer's block, whose inspiration is juiced up by a monkey! Plenty here to get one's teeth into, in some cases literally.
The Golden Door is set in Prohibition-era New York, with Irish immigrant Will Carthy searching for his half-sister, Isobel, who has disappeared after landing at Ellis Island. The scene is well set, with the glittering skyscrapers of modern Manhattan rising to tower above the teeming tenements through which Will scampers in his quest to find the red-haired girl who haunts his dreams. There's a large cast of characters, from the charismatic union agitator, Foxy Nolan, to the wealthy socialite couple with an agenda of their own. Kerry Jamieson writes very well, considering that this is her first novel, and if the melodrama becomes overheated at times, the story is still able to absorb it.
Kyle Mills, author of Storming Heaven, lives in Wyoming and spends his time skiing, rock-climbing and writing books. Nice work if you can get it. This present offering is a rather conventional tale of a maverick FBI agent who is exiled to a sleepy town in Arizona, comes across an international terrorist plot when a local millionaire and his wife are murdered, and sets out, more or less single-handed, to save the US from being brought to its knees. A good narrative pace, though, along with some well-drawn characters and a refreshing tongue-in-cheek attitude help to sugar the concoction. Won't put much strain on the little grey cells, but will certainly amuse.
Blowtorch comes with the tagline "Does for firefighting what Grisham and Turow have achieved for the legal profession". Get the message? Steve Jay is an operational officer in the London Fire Service and has featured in two former volumes by Pat O'Keefe. Here he has just seen four men brutally kill a woman by chopping off her head, then has half of East London's immigrant community mad at him, and has to find out who burned down an Asian cinema, leaving hundreds dead. Not what an ordinary firefighter expects to face each day of his working life, but more or less the norm, it seems, for our hero. Can I get away with saying that the pace is incandescent, as Jay attempts to fight his way through a nightmare of arson and murder?
Finally, the re-emergence of an old friend, the short, fat, balding detective with no name, no place to lay his head and no existence apart from his work, whom Dashiell Hammett first introduced to readers in 1923. One of the first of the fictional private eyes, who has to traverse the mean streets of a brutal and treacherous city, the Continental Op features in seven superb stories in this collection. Please, dear reader, I beg you, buy this book and treat yourself to the work of a true master of the crime genre.
Vincent Banville is a writer and critic