Tough and sexy, private detective McGill returns to New York

Reviewed: When the Thrill is Gone, Back of Beyond, Whispering Death, The Company Man.

Reviewed: When the Thrill is Gone, Back of Beyond, Whispering Death, The Company Man.

When the Thrill is Gone
By Walter Mosley
Orion, 359pp, $32.99
THIS is the third instalment - following The Long Fall and Known to Evil - in the series featuring Leonid McGill, a tough, philosophical African-American private detective who plies his perilous trade in today's New York City. It is complex, poetic and thoughtful. And sexy. McGill is asked by a beautiful young woman to investigate her rich husband, whom she suspects of infidelity and murder. McGill's girlfriend, Aura, is back, and intent on some serious conversation, while his wife, Katrina, has taken on a younger lover. Full of "the rough and tumble of brutish men", as McGill terms it, this is great hard-boiled fiction. Trouble is, at 55, McGill is finding that as life goes on the problems mount and their solutions often only make things worse.

Back of Beyond
By C. J. Box
Corvus, 372pp, $29.99
IN this tough, gripping read, C. J. Box overlays the noir western style of his Joe Pickett Wyoming game-ranger thrillers, and their atmospheric volatility, with something of the concrete police procedural. Detective Cody Hoyt, a Lewis and Clark County sheriff's department investigator, chain smoker and alcoholic struggling with two months' sobriety, is on the trail of whoever murdered his AA sponsor and left his remains in a burned-out cabin in the Big Belt Mountains. His investigations link the dead man to a group running a wilderness adventure in Yellowstone Park. Coincidentally, his estranged son has signed up for the same trip. As the chase unfolds, Box adds some classic Agatha Christie-style intrigue into what he calls his "witches' brew of Old West and New West".

Whispering Death
By Garry Disher
Text, 330pp, $32.99
THE sixth in Garry Disher's acclaimed Inspector Hal Challis regional procedural series finds a fastidious rapist in police uniform stalking his peninsula, a cool house-breaker and a serial armed robber headed in his direction. Disher works like a biographer, calmly attempting to assemble order in his characters' chaotic lives. Disher cares about their interlinked worlds as much as he does about labyrinthine plots, fetishised violence and the showy brainwork of his coppers. As always this grand master propels us methodically yet elegiacally. But he doesn't just provide classy entertainment. His fiction is a kind of social barometer of prevailing tensions in the community, especially in the outlying badlands of Australia's provincial coastal towns.

The Company Man
By Robert Jackson Bennett
Orbit, 454pp, $22.99
NEW to me, Robert Jackson Bennett has written an engrossing noir mystery that crosses genres into horror and alternative history science fiction, an engaging mix not uncommon as crime fiction continues to split generic atoms. He keeps his narrative concrete and his setting substantial, dark and ominous. It is 1919 and Cyril Hayes is the company man, a fixer for the McNaughton Corporation in the dystopian city of Evesden. But how does the company churn out industrial wonders at such speed? And why have hundreds of union workers been murdered? Bennett delivers his slow-burning crossover novel in spare, attractive prose, his characters obliquely and subtly realised, his narrative oddly touching.