On the trail of a devious killer

Reviewed: Fever of the Bone, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest, The Collaborator, On the Run

Reviewed: Fever of the Bone, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest, The Collaborator, On the Run

Fever of the Bone
By Val McDermid
Little Brown 432pp, $32.99
THIS is the sixth Val McDermid novel set in the fictional northern England town of Bradfield to feature clinical psychologist Tony Hill and Detective Chief Inspector Carol Jordan. McDermid sets them on the trail of a devious serial killer targeting seemingly unconnected young people. This is the eccentric Hill's most twisted adversary, a murderer with a shopping list of victims, contacting them in an online chatroom before meeting and sexually mutilating them. McDermid does this kind of sinister thing better than anyone else. With writerly panache she mixes the neo-gothic, the detective procedural and the psycho profile. Few writers in this field are able to so effortlessly accelerate the tension while manipulating the logistics of such a large cast.

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest
By Stieg Larsson
Quercus 602pp, $32.95
A CRUSADING Swedish investigative journalist who devoted his life to fighting fascism and religious and racial intolerance, Stieg Larsson handed three novels to his Swedish publisher in 2004. Not long afterwards, and before publication of the first, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, he died of a heart attack, aged just 50. Hornets' Nest is the final thriller in what became a publishing phenomenon, and again it's a masterpiece of epic plotting. Lisbeth Salander, Larsson's unlikely heroine, plots her revenge against the men who tried to kill her and the government agencies that nearly destroyed her life. But she's in intensive care, set to face trial for three murders and one attempted murder. Like Larsson's other wonderful novels, this one is also violent, playful and complex.

The Collaborator
By Gerald Seymour
Hodder & Stoughton 474pp, $32.99
GERALD Seymour, a former British television news correspondent, established himself at crime writing's cutting edge with the publication of his first thriller in 1975, Harry's Game, set in Northern Ireland. He's back in top form with this topical mafia thriller. A chance meeting between Immacolata Borelli, an Italian accountancy student, and Eddie Deacon, a language teacher, changes their lives. The Borellis are part of the camorra, the crime network that rules Naples, and Immacolata looks after her brother, a gangster wanted for multiple murders. She becomes an informer against her own family after her best friend dies of leukaemia, contracted from camorra-caused pollution. And she drags Deacon with her into a terrifying and unpredictable set of events.

On the Run
By Colin McLaren
MUP 286pp, $29.99
COLIN McLaren, a former taskforce detective and undercover cop, documented his career investigating some of Australia's worst crimes in his bestselling memoir, Infiltration. His first novel picks up where his clandestine life left off, after he busted the Griffith mafia. McLaren cleverly uses his real-life experience to inform a thrilling piece of fiction. As his fictional undercover cop Cole Goodwin and his team celebrate the guilty verdict after bringing leaders of the Australian mafia to justice, a vendetta is rolled out against him. To end it Goodwin must travel to bleak southern Italy, the heartland of the Calabrian mafia, which has sent a hit man after him. McLaren's sharp prose is punctuated with snappy dialogue, his plotting plausible and expertly paced.