Son of a gun

Reviewed: Saints of New York, Trick of the Dark, The Glass Rainbow, Agents of Treachery

Reviewed: Saints of New York, Trick of the Dark, The Glass Rainbow, Agents of Treachery

Saints of New York
By R. J. Ellory
Orion 488pp, $32.99
TRUCULENT New York PD detective Frank Parrish is the son of a legendary cop, one of the original "saints of New York", the crew who cleaned the city of the final vestiges of mafia control in the 1980s. As he investigates a series of possibly drug-related murders, Frank, with the help of a police counsellor, also tries to piece together his own life. And come to terms with his failed relationship with his father. Written in simple, unaffected prose, this gritty, edgy novel is un-putdownable, an example of what critic Jacques Barzun calls "stories of anxiety", which cater for the contemporary wish to feel vaguely disturbed. R.J. Ellory plays with the procedural story's conventions, and keeps the problem of guilt and complicity at the front of the reader's thinking.

Trick of the Dark
By Val McDermid
Little Brown 451pp, $32.99
FORENSIC psychiatrist Charlie Flint, suspended from her clinical work, receives a mysterious package of photocopied press cuttings in the mail, an account of the callous murder of a man on his wedding day. It occurred in the grounds of her old Oxford college, the killers later spending the night in an orgy of noisy sex. But the fact that the widowed bride, a drop-dead beauty in the princess Diana mould, is no stranger to her gets Flint delving into the past and a long line of bodies. It's an investigation complicated by her falling in love while already in a relationship with Maria the dentist, one she doesn't want to leave. Val McDermid, as always, offers what she calls "the satisfaction of a constructed shape" and few do crime with such artful prose and effortlessness of style.

The Glass Rainbow
By James Lee Burke
Orion 433pp, $32.99
THIS is as good as crime fiction gets and this fine novel may just be the best yet in the famous detective Dave Robicheaux series. This time the moody Louisiana cop and his lethal buddy, one-time rogue police officer turned private eye Clete Purcell, investigate the deaths of seven young women murdered in nearby Jefferson Davis Parish. Based on a series of real-life murders, the novel has at its centre the equally heinous crimes emanating from the petroleum industry that not only dominates Louisiana's coast but lately has been destroying it. While written before the BP oil disaster, The Glass Rainbow is a powerful allegorical story in which "the Bobbsey Twins from Homicide" confront evil people profiting from the venal and insidious violation of the Edenic world of southern Louisiana.

Agents of Treachery
Edited by Otto Penzler
Corvus 430pp, $32.99
EDITED by Otto Penzler, distinguished critic and proprietor of the famous Mysterious Bookshop in New York, one of the oldest and largest mystery specialist stores in the US, this is a cracking collection of spy stories. Penzler has persuaded some of the finest thriller writers to contribute their take on the espionage genre. Lee Child, Stella Rimington, Joseph Finder, Stephen Hunter, Robert Wilson and Charles McCarry are among the distinctive voices gathered in this collection. They take on the formation of special ops cells, interrogators' techniques, Arab undercover FBI agents and golf-playing gun fanatics in suburban modern Britain. There are plots within plots, treachery and duplicity. Otto Penzler provides more than 400 pages of intrigue.