THE new novel by Mark Timlin, Find My Way Home (Gollancz, £15.99 in UK), is the twelfth thriller to feature London private eye Nick Sharman. The series has proved very popular, a mark of its eminence being a pilot television programme with Clive Owen as Sharman with four more episodes to appear this autumn. The books are in the tradition of hard boiled pulp fiction tough, gritty and with no expletives deleted, and Sharman, an ex-cop down on his luck, is very much the prototype of the shabby knight errant traversing those mean, mean streets.
In this one he is hired by the widow of Harry Stonehouse to investigate her husband's sudden demise. Sudden and scattered, might be the best way to describe his violent death, for bits of him have been found all over the city of London. Harry was a policeman, a former colleague of Sharman's, who had disappeared for a year before he began surfacing under bushes, in a skip and on a garbage barge heading for a remote part of Essex.
Sharman soon discovers that Harry was involved in a £20 million robbery, the proceeds of which have, unlike Harry, never turned up. Stuck in an unlikely partnership with ex-DI Jack Robber, our hero has to move fast when bent coppers, a London gangster and a mob of irritated bikers get on his trial And of course, there is the obligatory femme fatale...
In this type of thriller, the plot is always secondary to the colourful characters, the slick one liners the fast pace and the kick'em in the goolies violence. Timlin, by now, is an expert in the genre, portraying the sleazy world of his anti hero in sepia tints, with goodole boy morality always winning out and the villains experiencing messy deaths. Not for the squeamish, but as an evocation of the corrupt underbelly of big city life, just about excellent.
John Fullerton's The Monkey House (Bantam Press, £15.99 in UK) is also set in a city, this time siege bound Sarajevo in the mid 1990s. The location adds an exotic taste to a first novel that is highly accomplished, and certainly more than a run of the mill thriller. This is writing of the first rank, with insightful character development, an intricate plot, purposeful dialogue, and a skilled meshing of cause, effect and outcome.
Police Superintendent Rosso is the one small voice of authority in a social fabric that is rapidly disintegrating. He can do nothing about the major crime, as exemplified by local warlord Luka, with whom the policeman's god daughter, Tanja, has become involved. But when a woman living in a bombed out block of flats, known as Monkey House brutally murdered he becomes dogged determined to solve her killing seeing in this single quest the possibility of sewing the first strand in a cohesiveness that might ultimately save his beloved city.
Legal thrillers are all the go at the moment, and two excellent ones are to hand. Jean Hanff Korelitz's heroine, in A Jury of Her Peers (Macmillan, £15.99 in UK), is defence lawyer Sybylla Muldoon, and the case she is defending is one in which a down and out man is accused of disfiguring a young girl. There seems little doubt that he is guilty of the crime, but deeper ramifications surface when the accused is found dead and Sybylla begins to investigate. Soon a conspiracy involving the use of LSD in brainwashing by intelligence services is uncovered, and our heroine has to dodge about inventively to avoid the resulting flak.
Richard North Patterson is an old hand at this type of crime novel and, in The Final Judgment (Hutchinson, £15.99 in UK), he is in fine fettle. His protagonist is also a woman, Caroline Masters, who is just about to be offered an appointment on the US Court of Appeals. First, however, she has to journey to the east coast to act as her niece Brett's defence attorney in a case where the young girl is accused of murdering her boyfriend. Again the case unearths past secrets, this time touching on Caroline's own life and her relationship with her domineering father, retired judge Channing Masters. Dark familial blood letting ensues and tragedy etches new survival traits in Caroline before she can return to California and take up her position as a judge.
Down to Carl Hiaasen land next, the Florida of natural and man made hurricanes, where we are in the company of Les Standiford and his building contractor hero, John Deal. This one is called Raw Deal (Macmillan, £16.99 in UK) and in it the eponymous hero is up against Vincente Luis Torreno, a major player in South Florida's emigre community, who has sold his compatriots the dream of returning to a free Cuba. This is only a sham, of course, to hide his own corrupt and devious designs, and it is Deal's misfortune that he has stumbled on to evidence that will show Torreno up in his true colours. The book has a raw force to it and a fast pace, but it lacks Hiaasen's insight and black humour. It is still a good read, though, and it features an original villain in the figure of Torreno's hit man, one Coco Morales.
Next, a more traditional English crime novel Natasha Cooper's Fruiting Bodies (Simon & Schuster, £14.99 in UK), featuring her sleuth Willow King. In hospital to have her first child her husband is Police Superintendent Tom Worth Willow stumbles upon a homicide when her obstetrician is found drowned in his own birthing pool. In spite of advice from her spouse not to get involved, our intrepid heroine sticks her nose in and, when violence occurs, nearly loses it. .Fruiting Bodies is well written, with a nicely worked out plot and an attractive protagonist, but it won't cause the hair on your head to rise. It will, however, keep you reading right to the last page.
Finally, for those of you who like trains and a bit of nefarious business combined, there is the delicious compendium Murder on the Railways (Orion, £16.99 in UK), edited by Peter Haining. This is a collection of tales by such as Agatha Christie, Roald Dahl, Ruth Rendell, Ernest Bramah now, hands up those who remember him and Dorothy L. Sayers, among many others, all dealing with crimes that occur in and around trains. I can't praise this anthology highly enough, and especially because of the fact that it contains that absolutely superb story, Elmore Leonard's "Three Ten to Yuma". Shove someone under a train for this book if you have to ...