Kathy Reich's Death Du Jour (Heinemann, £10 in UK) is the follow-up to her much-acclaimed and bestselling Deja Dead. Again it features Dr Temperance Brennan, forensic anthropologist to the state of Quebec, who this time is involved in two investigations, both of which soon coalesce and become one. Firstly she has to exhume the body of Sister Elizabeth Nicolet, a nun proposed for possible sainthood. In the process, Dr Temp finds that the pious lady's remains have recently been disturbed and reburied in a remote corner of a convent cemetery. Then she is called in to examine the site of a house fire in which a number of people, including two children, have perished. As she delves further into the two events, she becomes aware that a bizarre religious cult may be involved, a discovery that puts her personally in danger.
The story builds to an edge-of-the-seat climax, with both our heroine and her sidekick, Detective Ryan, escaping destruction by the skin of their teeth. Reichs writes well, describing both the Canadian locale and the forensic detail involved in the investigation expertly. And Brennan, a slightly softer version of Cornwell's Scarpetta, is a well-drawn and larger-than-life protagonist.
Russell Andrews's Gideon (Little, Brown, £10 in UK) is a more stereotypical thriller and comes with an endorsement from the actor Michael Douglas who, no doubt in the fullness of time, will turn it into a blockbuster film. It has all the necessary ingredients: an ordinary-guy main character who grows to hero status as the story progresses, his wise-cracking lover Amanda (I already see Tom Cruise and Sandra Bullock in these parts), an all-powerful mystery man pulling the strings (pity George Sanders is dead), a cache of secret documents (Hitchcock's McGuffin) and enough pace, verve and violence to enthral a captive audience. Russell Andrews - even the name is a pseudonym - has to be on his way to his first million.
Robert Wilson, author of A Small Death in Lisbon (HarperCollins, £9.99 in UK), follows in the footsteps of such writers of literary thrillers as John le Carre, Philip Kerr and Alan Furst. This is a large book in every way, large in volume - 440 pages - and large in scope and ambition. It is set in different time-warps: the early Forties, the Seventies and the present day. In 1941, Klaus Felsen, a Berlin businessman forced into the SS, kick-starts the story into motion when he arrives in neutral Lisbon to launder Nazi blood money. We then switch to the 1990s and a murder investigation conducted by Inspector Ze Coelho, a maverick member of the Policia Judiciaria. The victim is a young girl with a dubious sexual past, but as our policeman delves deeper he unearths a trail of conspiracy leading back to the 1974 upheavals in Portugal and then further back to the war years. A Small Death in Lisbon is a highly satisfying book, part thriller, part psychological mystery and part novel of ideas. And it is superbly well written.
Alison Taylor is a mystery-story writer I've admired for some time. In her latest, Unsafe Convictions (Heinemann, £10 in UK), Supt Michael McKenna of the North Wales police again features. This time the scene changes to the Pennines, where McKenna is investigating a charge of corruption against some fellow officers. It appears that some two years previously these officers suppressed alibi evidence in the case of one Stanton Smith, who was accused of murdering his wife. He was duly convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment, but then new evidence emerged, his alibi was confirmed and he was released from gaol. McKenna arrives in the bleak Pennine town of Haughton intent on searching out the truth, but finds his way impeded by a number of people with secrets to hide. Taylor writes most convincingly and her story is intensely haunting and gripping. Recommended.
David Yallop is best known for his highly sensational investigative books, the latest being an in-depth delve into the dirty politics of soccer, How They Stole the Game. Now he has come along with a thriller based on the narcotics industry. It is called Unholy Alliance (Bantam Press, £9.99 in UK), and it promises to be as controversial as any of his non-fiction volumes. Built into the fictional outline are a number of challenging factual statements, the main one being that the annual global turnover of the drug cartels is $500 billion. The premise here is that they are about to join forces in order to gain control of their biggest market, the US of A.
The result is a highly stylised but engaging comic book novel that recycles all the cliches. A big, colourful read for the rainy days of summer.
And another one in the same vein is Chris Ryan's Tenth Man Down (Century, £15.99 in UK). Ryan specialises in the crash-bang-wallop school of thriller writing, his books being noisy in the extreme. Here he has his team of SAS people, led by one Geordie Sharp, endeavouring to win back diamond mines seized by rebel forces in the African country of Kamanga. Again the cliches are all in place, including the presence of a beautiful German girl rescued from a plane crash. Pace is everything here, with the reader being given little time to catch his or her breath. Whew!
Michael Painter is a writer and critic