The unkindest cuts in many a day

LAST year, the legal profession, this year the medical - after a deluge of crime fiction dealing with lawyers, courtrooms and resounding gavels are we now to be inundated by a counterpoint of doctors, pill-popping and blood-gouting operations? Signs are on it. In Dr Carson's Scalpel the action is time and again suspended while we, the readers, are treated to another belt of medical jargon - and the procedures used when bodies are opened up are given in such detail that I was continually rushing to the mirror to examine my face and hair for blood and other subcutaneous matter.

Of course, this particular area is ideal for fictional double-dealing. One remembers the old joke about doctors being able to bury their mistakes; and who is there to notice that extra snip which cuts off the breathing tubes of an arch-enemy or an envied rival? Especially if the snipper is the head bottle-washer, Professor This or Doctor That, attired in pin-striped suit under hospital gown, driving a top-of-the-range BMW and having his consulting room in some salubrious area of the city.

And yes indeed, the arch-fiend in Scalpel is a wielder of that eponymous weapon, one Dr Dean Lynch, as bad a baddie as any Hannibal Lecter. I'm not giving anything away here, as his identity is revealed early on in the story, the remainder of the plot being taken over by his tracking-down and eventual come-uppance.

Running side by side with that narrative strand is another one which follows the kidnapping of the newborn son of Harry O'Brien, chairman and majority shareholder in the O'Brien Corporation, one of Ireland's few multi-national companies. This foul deed is carried out by a small-time Dublin criminal called Tommy Malone and his A-team, consisting of as incompetent a group of fumblers as one could wish to come across in a month of Sundays.

Ranged against these social outcasts is the gang-busting team of DI Jack McGrath and Sergeants Tony Dowling and Kate Hamilton. All the characters in this novel are stereotypes - the black-as-black villain, the petty criminals who talk in a "youse are a bollox"-type language, the caring nurse, the bluff industrialist, the pin-up doctor - and the upholders of the law are no different. McGrath is the older, seen-it-all detective, Dowling his not-too- bright assistant, and Hamilton the tough single mother with a young son and a driving ambition to get on in a male-dominated police force.

Don't seek, then, for deep psychological introspection in this particular volume, nor insights into motivation or cause and effect. The doctor kills because he was ill-treated in an orphanage in his youth, the petty criminal acts on the presumption of establishing one last big score. What satisfaction to be got is from a fast pace, an energetic storyline and an old-fashioned prose style reminiscent of the adventure novels of Edgar Wallace or the Bulldog Drummond stories of Sapper.

However, neither of the aformentioned authors would have written anything as stark as: "The blade entered her body in one decisive hand movement. From somewhere deep inside her almost totally anaesthetised brain, Sandra O'Brien screamed. The blade continued its downward sweep, from navel to pub is, opening up her belly and exposing the bulging muscle layers underneath. Behind his face mask a smile flickered."

And this, I'll have you know, is merely a description of a Caesarean section. The murders come later. {CORRECTION} 97051200050