`The Last Dance" (Hodder & Stoughton, £16.99 in UK) is Ed McBain's fiftieth 87th Precinct novel, and it is as gritty and engrossing as the first one. Fans will know the detectives - Carella, Brown, Kling, Meyer and Co - as old friends, and the city of Isola - which both is and is not New York - still harbours its quota of killers, weirdos and psychopaths. In this one Detective Fat Ollie Weeks, equal-opportunity bigot from the 88th Precinct, figures large when the murder of a topless dancer in his bailiwick becomes tied in with another homicide, that of an old man found dead in his bed and who turns out to have been hanged, that Carella is investigating. As always, the action is fast and pacey: a stoolie named Danny the Gimp is shot while talking to Carella, a knife-scarred Jamaican contract killer is heard but not seen, likewise El Jefe, a dealer of designer drugs, while a play written in the 1920s and now being turned into a musical serves as the cornerstone of a multi-faceted plot. Lovely stuff. And by way of a little puzzle: who could the Dublin journalist be, the author of a serial-killer bestseller, that McBain accuses of stealing the name of one of his characters?
In Colin Bateman's Turbulent Priests (HarperCollins, £10.99 in UK) a girl child, Christine, born to Moira while attending a Cliff Richard concert, is believed by the inhabitants of Wrathlin Island off the coast of Ireland to be the new Messiah. For no reason other than to suit the plot, journalist Dan Starkey is asked by Cardinal Daley to investigate the phenomenon and report back to him. Incredibly, Starkey obliges and, with wife Patricia and Little Stevie, a child not his own, in tow, journeys out to the island and into a maelstrom of violence, death and wholesale destruction. Priests even madder than Father Ted and his gang plan to kidnap the child and institute a Second Coming, and our hero, desperate Dan, with the aid of Patricia, Little Stevie and a hedgehog, is the only one who can stop them. Proving that the pen is mightier than the sword, he succeeds, but not before his madcap progress just about lays waste to the island. This is in-your-face farce at its most blatant, and, if that's what you like, then go to it.
Cynthia Harrod-Eagles also uses humour to dilute tension in her Bill Slider mysteries, and in the latest, Blood Sinister (Little Brown, £16.99 in UK), it is again the interplay between D.I. Slider and his colleague, Atherton, that provides a lot of the jokey asides.
The main plot is concerned with the murder of award-winning journalist Phoebe Agnew, found bound and strangled in the chaos of her flat. Known for championing the underdog and for attacking the police in print, Agnew had many enemies, and Slider has to untangle a convoluted skein before arriving at a solution to her violent death. At the same time he has to deal with the strange behaviour of Atherton, who appears to be on the point of a nervous breakdown. HarrodEagles is a master of the telling phrase or the catchy put-down - commenting that no man likes to hear the word "commitment", she goes on "Like `castration', just the sound of it made you cross your legs and fidget." Reading her is a joy.
In Welcome to Paradise (Orion, £16.99 in UK), Laurence Shames introduces us to two Big Als, as they arrive to holiday in Florida. One is Big Al Tuschman, a six-foot-five furniture salesman from New Jersey, the other Big Al Marracotta, a five-foot-three mobster from New York.
They both have their pet dogs in tow; Tuschman's a tiny shih tzu, Marracotta's a nervous rottweiller. Mobster Al also enjoys the company of his long-suffering girlfriend, Katy Sansone, much younger than her protector and eager to break the connection. Unknown to Marracotta, there is a contract out on him, but the two bungling assassins who are hired to do the job mix up the two Als, and make various inept efforts on the life of the furniture salesman rather than that of their intended victim. More broad farce, then, somewhat in the vein of Carl Hiaasen, but lacking that writer's satirical bite. Entertaining just the same - but requiring, as in Bateman's case, a high suspension of incredulity.
Gerald Seymour is an old hand at the thriller-writing game and his latest, Holding the Zero (Bantam Press, £9.99 in UK), shows him in good form. Exotic locales are just one of his specialities, and here he sets his action in Northern Iraq, where Kurdish guerrillas are fighting a savage war against the military strength of Saddam Hussein.
Gus Peake, a competition marksman of the highest quality, but one who has never fired a shot in anger, is sent to this barren outpost on Her Majesty's Service, and finds himself engaged in a duel to the death with Major Aziz, the most dedicated professional sniper in Saddam's army. Seymour's books are adventure story writing, pure and simple, the divisions between the good guys and the bad guys spelled out in black and white, with no grey areas. They are there to entertain, not to be thought-provoking, and when viewed in that light, are superior of their type. Rattling good yarns, in fact.
Richard North Patterson writes legal thrillers, his latest being Dark Lady (Hutchinson, £15.99 in UK). In a mid-western city, struggling to survive economically, two prominent men are found dead within days of one another. One is the manager of a company that is building a baseball stadium, while the other is the local drug dealer's lawyer. Stella Marz, head of the homicide division of the County Prosecutor's office, investigates and finds a nest of conspiracy connecting the two deaths. As she delves further into the morass, events from her own difficult past begin to surface, and the closer she gets to the truth the more personal the price she may have to pay. Dark Lady is a thoroughly professional piece of work, an excellent example of the legal thriller at its best.
Michael Painter is a writer and critic