Crime file

REVIEWED: The Family, Port Mortuary, Red Wolf, American Assassin.

REVIEWED: The Family, Port Mortuary, Red Wolf, American Assassin.

The Family, by Martina Cole, Headline, 496pp, $32.99

BESTSELLING London writer Martina Cole's hard-nosed novels have sold more than 10 million copies and this is as tough as any. Her books are said to be the most requested from prison libraries, and the most stolen. You may have seen her on pay television, growling in those gravelly East London vowels while hosting Ladykillers, profiling female serial murderers.

She's in killing form here, or at least heroine Christine Murphy wants to be: like her sons, sinking deeper and deeper into London gang lord husband Phillip's corrupt world. Can the medication stop her from taking a gun and mowing down the lot of them? In a family in which death, threats and violence are natural, can Christine somehow turn the code of honour? Fast-paced, this is just the read when a family Christmas becomes too trying.

Port Mortuary, by Patricia Cornwell, Sphere, 496pp, $49.99

PATRICIA Cornwell's latest, a welcome summer blockbuster read, finds forensic pathologist Kay Scarpetta training at the Port Dover Mortuary, mastering the art of virtual autopsy: 3-D imaging radiology is a groundbreaking procedure that could soon revolutionise forensic science. The traditional post-mortem examination -- dissect, photograph after the fact and hope nothing is missed -- is quickly being dramatically improved by technology.

And quickly Scarpetta's new skills are put to the test when a young man drops dead, apparently from a heart condition, but there are startling indications he may have been alive when he was zipped inside the coroner's pouch. Written in Scarpetta's narrative voice, Cornwell's novel is pleasurably expert as always, working in a style that remains so grittily her own.

Red Wolf, by Liza Marklund, Random House, 508pp, $32.95

LIZA Marklund is another dazzling Swedish crime writer. This is the fifth book in her series featuring her experienced crime reporter Annika Bengtzon. Still recovering from the recent traumas suffered in an earlier investigation, she is suddenly involved in a new case when another journalist is killed in an apparent hit-and-run accident. It doesn't take Annika long to find out that he has been brutally murdered. She is soon involved in another violent investigation somehow stemming from an earlier terrorist attack on a military airport named F21 by a group that called itself the Beasts. Marklund has it all: a telling sense of place, driving plot, crisp prose, complex characterisation, and a nice slant on Scandinavian politics. Little wonder she has sold more than 11 million copies of her books in 30 languages.

American Assassin, by Vince Flynn, Simon & Schuster, 435pp, $32.99

VINCE Flynn is new to me but a big seller in the US, his fans right behind his gung-ho approach to homeland and national security. Unlike many writers working the espionage genre, the enemies of Flynn's spy superhero, Mitch Rapp, are not treacherous fellow citizens whose greed, folly or incompetence leads them to betray the West. It is America's old enemy, Russia, and its new adversary, the Islamic extremists. In this fast-paced read, Flynn hurtles his CIA-trained hero, a dead ringer for Jason Bourne, across Virginia in the deep south to Turkey, Germany, Switzerland and Lebanon to confront the terrorists. For a novel that Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck have probably already endorsed, it's well written and oddly clever, and occasionally quite unexpected. Flynn's writerly energy never gives you time to ponder the cliches.