CRIME: A selection of crime novelsALL HAIL THE wonderful PD James. At the fine old age of 88, she has penned a new Commander Adam Dalgliesh novel and very well put together it is too. When she was a child, Rhoda Gradwyn's drunken father slashed her cheek with a broken bottle. Now in her early 40s and having won fame as an investigative journalist, she has decided to book into a private clinic in Dorset to have the disfiguring facial scar removed.
The night after the operation she is strangled. Immediately poet detective Dalgliesh and his team are called in to untangle the resulting web of conspiracy and deceit. Soon afterwards, another death occurs and the detectives are put to their wits end to solve the puzzle. But solve it they do.
The Private Patient (Faber Faber, £18.99) is a book that a person of any age would have been proud to have written. It flows along at a steady pace, the dialogue is convincing, and the plot nicely complicated. In short, it is a great read.
The second dame of British crime writing, Ruth Rendell, appears writing as Barbara Vine in our next offering, The Birthday Present (Viking, £18.99). These novels are darker than when she is writing under her own name. This one follows the rise and fall of politician Ivor Tesham in the 1990s in Margaret Thatcher's government.
He is having an affair with London housewife Hebe, who is stuck in a dull marriage. They are into weird sex, so as a present for her birthday he hires two men to kidnap and bind her, and deliver her to his house. Unfortunately the car crashes, resulting in the death of Hebe and one of the men. The other man, one Dermot Lynch, is badly injured and is unable to speak.
Ivor spends the next few years trying to cover up his guilt in the matter, but things eventually fall out and he tries to commit suicide. The story is told by two narrators, his brother-in-law and a friend of Hebe's: the brother-in-law matter of fact, the friend more and more hysterical. Again a great read from a master of the story-telling process.
It is a great pleasure to come across a new novel by Alan Furst The Spies of Warsaw (Weidenfeld Nicolson, £16.99) is set in 1937 in the city of Warsaw, where Col Jean-François Mercier, a decorated hero of the First World War, is military attaché in the French embassy.
The city is seething with spies from practically every country in Europe, and Col Mercier must tread carefully among them. His main adversary is the evil August Voss of the German SS counter-intelligence, who wishes to take revenge on him for a plot of Voss's that he foiled.
Running alongside this story of abduction and intrigue is a love story that is told in such a lyrical fashion that it becomes enthralling. The writing all through seems effortless, the sign of all good writing. I would recommend this novel without reservation.
Next, to a more or less traditional crime novel by Kathy Reichs. Devil Bones (Heinemann, £18.99) features the author's series character Temperance Brennan, a forensic anthropologist working out of Charlotte, North Carolina. When she unearths an underground chamber containing a human skull with the jaw missing, she finds herself caught up in a case that will lead to some shocking secrets being revealed.
Soon another body is discovered, headless and with the torso carved with satanic symbols. Led by a preacher-turned-politician who proclaims that there is devil worship at work, the citizens of the town are turned into vigilantes intent on revenge. Temperance has a lot on her hands and, in a chilling climax, nearly loses her own head. Fast-paced and chilling, Devil Bones will keep you reading to the end.
Now off to Sweden for an atmospheric novel by Hakan Nesser. In The Mind's Eye (Macmillan, £16.99. Translated from the Swedish by Laurie Thompson), Janek Mitter stumbles into his bathroom one morning after a night of heavy drinking to find his beautiful young wife Eva dead in the overflowing bath. Suffering from memory loss, Mitter cannot remember attacking his wife and, even through his resultant trial and incarceration, he has no memory of the event.
The investigating policeman is detective chief inspector Van Veeteren, and he believes that the husband may not be guilty. To that effect he begins an investigation that peels away layers of deceit and shows that events in the past have caused these tragic consequences. The Mind's Eye is a short novel that holds the tension right to the end. Another winner from Scandinavia.
Finally, there is Laura Lippman with a new novel, Another Thing to Fall, (Orion, £9.99) featuring her private eye Tess Monaghan. Lippman is married to David Simon, one of the producers of the long-running TV series The Wire, which is set in her home town of Baltimore. No surprise then that her plot concerns the making of such a series called Mann of Steel in that same town of Baltimore.
Tess is hired to act as a bodyguard for the female star of the show, a precocious 20-year-old called Selene Waites. It is not long before trouble erupts, and two murders are committed. However, the mystery side of things takes a back row to the machinations behind the running of the show. This side of things is the more interesting in a novel that ends, not with a bang but a whimper.
Vincent Banville is a writer