KENNETH ABEL's second crime thriller, The Blue Wall (Orion, £16.99 in UK), shows that he has already established a recognisable style of tone and form. Comparisons are invidious, yet the tough dialogue and laconic characters remind me a little of Elmore Leonard's stable of the genre's thoroughbreds, while the plotting and NYPD set ups pay obeisance to the 87th Precinct novels of Ed McBain.
However, Abel is a true original and should be greeted joyously as such. In The Blue Wall he takes his detective, Dave Moser, along a most intricate plot line, involving a series of apparently unconnected contract killings, and Internal Affairs Division investigation into crooked cops, and a trail of corruption that leads to Central America and atrocities on the grand scale.
Moser, flawed but basically doing his best to stay on the right side of the eponymous Blue Wall, also has a highly confused personal life: his wife has left him, his car has given up the ghost, and his neighbour and friend is one of the cops that Internal Affairs is trying to get him to rat on.
Skilfully author Abel charts his hero's descent into the inferno, using a technically proficient method of alternating between the various chief characters. No great mystery here, as in most modern American crime fiction; rather, the attraction lies in the vividness of the writing, the punchy dialogue, the scaring suddenness of the action, and the breathless pace of the narrative.
And in case one imagines The Blue Wall to be a one off, Abel's first novel, Bait, equally as memorable, is now available in Orion paperback (£4.99 in UK).
Gerald Seymour can always be relied upon to provide a good story, and in his latest thriller, Killing Ground (Bantam Press, £15.99 in UK), he does not disappoint. Don't look for or expect deep introspective insight: this is a slam bang adventure novel all the way, with young English girl Charlotte Parsons being set up by the US Drug Enforcement Agency to help trap the head of the Sicilian Mafia, no less. How this comes about, I'll leave it to Mr Seymour to detail, but the result is a highly enjoyable, if slightly old fashioned, read.
Colin Forbes could be placed in the same category as Mr Seymour. His latest, The Cauldron (Macmillan, £16.99 in UK), features the enigmatic Tweed and his Dream Team of espionage operatives. Their mission is to thwart the evil designs of Vincent Bernard Moloch, creator of AMBECO, the largest conglomerate on the planet. James Bond stuff, this, with many glamorous settings in the world's capitals, bodies dropping like autumn leaves, and a gung ho comic book dash and vigour redolent of yesterdays of the Hotspur, the Rover and the Wizard - ah me . . .
David Lindsey, on the other hand, in his Requiem for a Glass Heart (Little, Brown, (£9.99 in UK - note the price!), gives a new twist to the old formula by having his heroes heroines - yes, FBI special agent Cate Cuevas and professional killer Irina Ismaylov are the pair fro join forces to fight the good fight against the combined might of the Chinese Triads, the Sicilian Cosa Nostra and the Russian Mafia. Feminists of the World Unite! might be the catch phrase of this ebullient piece of nonsense, which nonetheless carries one along at a jolly pace and with much lively inventiveness. I mean, who could possibly dislike a book that ends with: "Of all the many passions that gripped and compelled the human heart in the course of a lifetime the greatest of them was love.
In Under the Beetle's Cellar (Harper Collins, £15.99 in UK), Mary Willis Walker gives us a kidnap story of rare intensity and mounting tension. No, I didn't steal that quote from the blurb, the book actually is a superb suspense thriller, with bus driver Walter Demming and eleven schoolchildren held captive and buried underground by charismatic Samuel Mordecai, leader of a fanatical fundamentalist cult.
Again our protagonist is a woman, crime reporter Molly Cates, who has built up an uneasy rapport with Mordecai and now has to fight a cat and mouse game with the evil one in order to win the release of his prisoners. And her partner? Why, a Clarice Starling clone called Rain Conroy, FBI super killer, who gives the best advice yet to Molly before they go in to beard the killer in his den, when she warns her to be sure and make a pee before they venture forth.
After all the mayhem and blood letting, it is pleasing, to come across Ruth Dudley Edwards's traditional English murder mystery, Murder in a Cathedral (HarperCollins, £14.99 in UK). Again featuring her female sleuth, the redoubtable Baroness Troutbeck, and her male helper, Robert Amiss - not to mention the cat, Plutarch - this engaging episode features not bats, but gays, in the belfries of Westonbury Cathedral. When warfare breaks out between a clique of High Church gays and the new Dean, murder ensues, and it falls to Troutbeck - known more familiarly as Jack - and her helpers to extricate the other worldly Bishop from the maze of conspiracy and back stabbing he has unwittingly stumbled into. A wise and witty read, this, with much gentle humour, sympathetic characters and most of the blood letting occurring offstage.
Finally to a number of compendiums of short crime fictions that arrived over and after the festive season: Women on the Case (Virago, £16.99 in UK), edited and introduced by Sara Paretsky, contains twenty six original stories by women crime writers, most of them excellent of their kind; Murder for Love (Orion £16.99 in UK), edited by Otto Penzler, has sixteen stories by the likes of Elmore Leonard, James Crumley, Mary Higgins Clark and Joyce Carol Oates - very patchy but the offering by Leonard is superb, as usual; Sins of the Fathers: An Anthology of Clerical Crime (Gollancz, £15.99 in UK), edited by Mark Bryant, with fourteen hoary chestnuts by the likes of G. K. Chesterton, Saki and even Chekhov - and they prove to be highly enjoyable; and The Orion Book of Murder (£16.99), edited by Peter Haining, which has to be the super anthology of all time and is simply delightful.