Master of the labyrinth

Reviewed: A Welcome Grave, Red Mandarin Dress, The Blue Zone, No Time for Goodbye

Reviewed: A Welcome Grave, Red Mandarin Dress, The Blue Zone, No Time for Goodbye

A Welcome Grave
By Michael Koryta
Allen & Unwin, 
294pp, $29.95
THE third novel by award-winning mystery writer Michael Koryta features private investigator Lincoln Perry. Once a rising star on the Cleveland police force, Perry ended his career when he left prominent attorney Alex Jefferson bleeding in the parking lot of his country club. When the lawyer is murdered his rich widow, once Perry's fiancee, employs a reluctant Perry to find Jefferson's estranged son, a partial beneficiary of the dead man's fortune. Tough, smart and possessing a crime addict's understanding of the labyrinthine permutations of the private eye genre, Koryta is as good as any in the game.


Red Mandarin Dress
Qui Xiaolong
Sceptre, 310pp, $32.95
CHINESE-BORN Qui Xiaolong (pronounced "Chew Shao-long") elegantly uses murder and political intrigue to explore the rapidly changing society of modern China. In Red Mandarin Dress, the scholarly Chief Inspector Chen confronts a series of murders in which each of the young pretty victims is found wearing a red mandarin dress, torn in the side slits, several bosom buttons unbuttoned. Xiaolong handles the expectations of the generic Western procedural hero with a gorgeously poetic style full of beguiling Confucian proverbs.

The Blue Zone
By Andrew Gross
HarperCollins, 472pp, $19.99
WITH James Patterson, Andrew Gross is the co-author of five New York Times No.1 bestsellers. On his first solo outing, Gross has turned in a lively FBI witness protection program thriller, one of those dread-filled "life altered without recognition" narratives. Lots of duplicity and detection in short chapter grabs, where set pieces and cliff-hangers tumble over each other with such implausibility you feel you have entered a parallel universe.

No Time for Goodbye
By Linwood Barclay
Orion, 339pp, $33
FROM critically acclaimed author Linwood Barclay comes a page-turner that immediately places its author on the shelf alongside Harlan Corben. Barclay has Corben's gift for the simple, shattering plot kicker: what if everyone you loved had disappeared overnight without so much as a chance to ask why? Cynthia Bigge is still understandably haunted by the eerie events, then someone returns to her Connecticut town to finish what was started 25 years ago. Barclay also has Corben's ability with pace and structure with a few convoluted narrative tricks of his own. And he similarly grounds his unsettling events in the details of everyday suburban life with a menacing polish and just the right layers of humour and wryness.