CrimefileHard to believe that Ed McBain is 78 years young and still turning out ingenious mystery puzzles centred on Police Precinct 87. As usual the gang's all here, but it's Steve Carella who is the main investigator - yes, he with the beautiful deaf- and-dumb wife and the delectable twins.
And it is appropriate that his opponent in Hark is the Deaf Man, a notorious criminal who should be well-known to faithful readers of this incredible series, for he has appeared a number of times before.
In this episode, he is planning a big robbery, and plays with the detectives of the 87th squad by sending them quotes from Shakespeare. Like another book in this particular review, the plot revolves around a rare violin, but it is the dialogue - wry, laconic and very much up to date - that drives the story along. And needless to say, the Deaf Man fades into the sunset, to reappear some other time in the future.
Jeff Abbott is one of the newer guys on the crime-writing block, and we are told that big things are in store for him. Maybe so, but I'll need better evidence than Black Jack Point to get me to concur. This is a run-of-the-mill crime caper about the search for buried treasure by a disparate group of bad guys, led by the ultra-psychotic Alex Black. Opposing him are Judge Whit Mosley, Det Claudia Salazar and fishing-guide-cum-ex-superman Gooch. There are double- and triple-crosses, and a patched-on ending where one of the good guys turns out to be not so good. Nothing much original about any of it, but maybe things will improve in future volumes.
And so we come to my old friend, Robert B. Parker. For some reason, his crime novels always set my teeth on edge. Relying on cut-to-the-quick dialogue, he always seems to be much too smart for his own good. In Melancholy Baby, instead of the Boston-based Spenser, he gives us a female P.I. named Sunny Randall, but otherwise nothing has changed. If Spenser had had a sex change, he would be Sunny: streetwise, cynical, quick with a fist or a gun, and always ready with a one-liner or an in-your-face quip. Here our heroine has to put up with her ex-husband deciding to remarry; investigate a dysfunctional family; ward off an over-affectionate bull terrier called Rosie; and deal with a number of demons from her own past. A few good wisecracks don't make a book, and there's nothing quite as good as Raymond Chandler's "the only difference between him and a monkey was that the monkey was wearing a bigger hat".
Paul Adam's Sleeper is the second to feature a priceless violin - in this case, Stradivari's fabled Messiah, the Mona Lisa of the music world. Tomaso Rainaldi, an elderly violin-maker, is hired by eccentric millionaire collector Enrico Forlani to find the instrument. He ends up dead, however, a chisel embedded in the back of his neck. His friend and fellow violin-maker, Gianni Castiglione, is determined to solve the old man's murder and, with the help of a friendly policeman, he goes to Venice to investigate. The exotic settings and the background of the music world help to add colour to an intriguing mystery that certainly gives value for money.
Erin Hart was born in Minnesota, but spends a lot of her time in the west of Ireland. Her first novel, Haunted Ground, was set there, and combined myth and fable and an amount of historical fact to provide an enthralling read. Now, in her second offering, Lake of Sorrows, she ploughs much the same furrow: the discovery of an ancient "bog body" by workers harvesting turf, leading pathologist Nora Gavin and her lover, forensic archaeologist Cormac Maguire, into the depths of a mystery that involves hidden treasure, ritual animal slaughter and illicit love affairs. A second body is uncovered, this time wearing a watch, and our protagonists have to put their own safety at risk in their efforts to reveal a ruthless killer. Hart writes a fast-paced story that is given depth and resonance by the power of her descriptive gifts. Recommended.
Finally we have Margaret Murphy's eighth thriller, The Dispossessed, set in Liverpool and featuring D.I. Jeff Rickman. This time he is investigating the murder of an Afghan refugee, whose body is discovered by Rickman's girlfriend when it tumbles out of a waste-bin. Rickman is a fully realised character, tough but vulnerable, and the other cast members in this readable mystery are also beautifully delineated. The members of the Afghan community refuse to divulge anything to our hero, and then things turn nasty when the investigation spills over into his private life.
Murphy is a dab hand at creating menace beneath a deceptively light surface, and the book ends up as a hard-hitting thriller that takes no hostages to fortune.
Vincent Banville is a novelist and critic
Hark By Ed McBain Orion, £12.99 Black Jack Point By Jeff Abbott Orion, £9.99 Melancholy Baby By Robert B. Parker John Murray, £17.99 Sleeper By Paul Adam Time Warner, £17.99 Lake of Sorrows By Erin Hart Hodder & Stoughton, £18.99 The Dispossessed By Margaret Murphy Hodder & Stoughton, £15.99