Lost soul in serch of a voice

Reviewed: The Lock Artist, The Reversal, The Priest, From the Dead

Reviewed: The Lock Artist, The Reversal, The Priest, From the Dead

The Lock Artist
By Steve Hamilton
Orion, 304pp, $29.99
THIS is a remarkable read, beautifully plotted, crammed with sympathetic characters and full of the most wonderfully arcane safe-cracking information. Michael Smith (aka "Boy Wonder", "The Milford Mute", "The Golden Boy") is a "boxman"; his talent is to be able to open any container, safe, padlock or door without a key. His strange skill lands him in jail, where he writes his story. Because of a traumatic experience at the age of eight, Mike can't speak, a lost soul with gifts that propel him through an odyssey in which he attempts to find his voice while dealing with a range of criminals and sophisticated locks. This is an ingeniously inventive thriller, smart, off-beat, written with great skill in nicely vernacular prose. The movie can't be far away.

The Reversal
By Michael Connelly
Allen & Unwin, 451pp, $32.99
MICHAEL Connelly pleasingly reprises his longtime defence attorney, Mickey Haller, and his hard-boiled Los Angeles Police Department cop, Harry Bosch, in this highly satisfying read. Haller is recruited to change sides to prosecute convicted child killer Jason Jessup, who has spent 24 years in prison, in a high-profile retrial. Jessup's original case has been reversed after DNA evidence surfaces echoing his long-held claims of innocence. The new case appears to be little more than an exercise in political masochism, but Haller accepts it on condition he choose his own investigator (Bosch). The courtroom drama is engrossing, Bosch's investigation as focused as ever and the denouement as good as anything Connelly has ever sprung. He writes with a penetrating narrative vision that never lets his plot rest.

The Priest
By Gerard O'Donovan
Sphere, 374pp, $32.99
GERARD O'Donovan is a pleasing new Irish voice and his DI, Mike Mulcahy, may do for Dublin what Ian Rankin's hard-boiled cop, Rebus, did for Edinburgh. In this debut procedural, Mulcahy investigates a killer stalking the city, attacking his victims with a cross before sending them to God. After a Spanish diplomat's daughter is brutally assaulted, branded with burns from a scalding-hot cross, Mulcahy and new partner, Claire Brogan, discover there may have been other victims in the past. The murderer, nicknamed the Priest, is seriously evil and elusive. Well-paced and full of the set-pieces crime fans adore, O'Donovan's first Mulcahy novel is a classy exploration of the melancholy cop story. It will be a pleasure to be in the company of Mulcahy and Brogan again in the future.

From the Dead
By Mark Billingham
Little Brown, 362pp, $32.99
FORMER stand-up comedian Mark Billingham returns with another great DI Thorne novel, his ninth, as always relentlessly paced and ingeniously plotted. Billingham has a gift for writing about shocking things so that we need to keep reading to find some understanding of how they happen. Few writers deliver so many punches to the heart. If it hurts to read him sometimes, there's no way you want to stop. A decade after gangster Alan Langford was murdered while handcuffed to the steering wheel of his Jag, doubts arise about his death. His wife, Donna, who hired a hit man to kill her husband, was arrested and sentenced to life along with her Irish accomplice. Soon the case takes Thorne a long way from his London beat.