A choice of recent thrillers
Harriet Waugh
Dead Souls by Ian Rankin (Orion, £9.99) shows the continuing development of Inspector John Rebus's darkening soul. In the author's previous novel, The Hanging Garden, Rebus's grown-up daughter, Samantha, is badly injured by a hit-and-run driver. Rebus believes that she was target- ed because of a gangland investigation he is involved in, and enters the murky world of criminal favours in his quest for the driver of the car. In Dead Souls Rebus's frustrated anger prompts him to out a released paederast, a sad man more sinned against than sinning. The results are wretchedly grimy and tragic. This is not the first time that Rebus has got hot under the collar when faced with paederastic behaviour. He is nothing if not consistent.
As is usual with Ian Rankin the novel contains a mix of three cases. The main case has at its centre a fascinating portrait of a dangerous psychopath. Cary Oakes is being released early from a prison sentence for murder in America and deported to Edinburgh where he was born and brought up and where he is the chief suspect for the unsolved murder of a young woman. The police are jumpy. They reckon he has an agenda, only they do not know what it is. They decide he should be shadowed and Rebus, to his cost, is in charge of the assignment. Oakes runs rings round him.
The two other cases are personal. Rebus is haunted by the suicide of a colleague, a top-flight detective who jumped to his death off the edge of Arthur's Seat, a precipice on a hill that hangs high above the city. He wonders what makes a highly successful detective, happily married and the father of a little girl, kill himself. In the third case he is contacted by the husband of an ex-girlfriend from his schooldays. Their son has gone missing after a night out with his mates. This case, which is the least interesting, is really an excuse for a nostalgic trip down memory lane as Rebus tries to make sense of past emotions and actions that have led him to be the drunk- en, complex fellow he is. There is also a separately published novella called Death Is Not the End (Orion, £5.99) that takes this third plot, subtly changes it, and comes up with a different denouement. It is difficult to be really interested in the novella if you have already read the novel. Also, I have never been easy with alternative endings as I suffer from a childlike wish to believe in fiction's reality.
Henry Porter's first novel, Remembrance Day (Orion, £12.99), is an enjoyable thriller with a good many twists before it simplifies into a race against time with some unlikely explanations offered for curious happen- ings. The hero, Constantine Lindow, is a well-thought-of geneticist who, though born in Ireland, has spent his life in Boston. Now in a new job in London he is waiting for a reunion with his brother Eamon, a librarian, outside a central underground station when a passing bus explodes, causing carnage. Shortly after being patched up in hospital Constantine is arrested as the chief suspect. His brother, now dead, was on the bus and thought to be carrying the bomb. The police say that Eamon was a member of the IRA. They suspect that he belonged to a renegade group out to sabotage the peace agree- ment. Luckily for Lindow, Commander Kenneth Foyle, head of the Metropolitan Anti-terrorist Unit, is not as sure as his superiors of his guilt. He releases him, to the fury of MI5, who have their own rea- sons for wishing Lindow to be thought guilty. To his consternation, Constantine finds that his brother was indeed closely connected to them. Blackmailed by the IRA and under continual threat of being re-arrested, he decides that the only thing to do is to discover what his brother had been up to and who had placed the bomb on the bus. Gradually he uncovers a com- plex and terrible plot orchestrated by a clever psychopath, but not only do he and Commander Foyle have to thwart it before it is perpetrated, they do so in the face of strong resistance on the home front to their uncovering the truth.
The complexity of the story is gripping, but it begins to lose focus when Constan- tine tracks the perpetrator to a forest in Maine with the cavalry in the form of the FBI in loose attendance. The more active Constantine and Foyle become, the less credible it all seems, but for the first two- thirds, Remembrance Day is enthralling.
Nicci French's Killing Me Softly (Michael Joseph, £9.99) is a strange, uneasy but ulti- mately satisfying thriller. Alice Loudon, a pretty, scientific administrator living with her boyfriend Jake, has a close circle of friends until one day she is caught in the stare of a startlingly handsome man. She comes out of the office at lunchtime to find him still standing in exactly the same spot waiting for her. She starts an affair and over the next few weeks breaks up with her boyfriend and cuts herself off from her friends. Although she still sometimes shows up at the office she does no work. Every- thing is gradually extinguished except the depth of sexual and emotional feeling engendered by her lover Adam Tallis, mountaineer and hero. His concentrated love and increasingly violent possession of her leave her with no ties. Far too late for her safety and sanity she starts to unravel Adam's secret past, and as she does so the novel gathers interest and pace. This is Nicci French's third novel and is just as compellingly well plotted as her first two.
Rebecca Tope is a new talent. Her first novel, A Dirty Death (Piatkus, £17.99), is set down on the farm. Farmer Guy Bear- don is found face down in the slurry pit by his daughter Lilah. Initially, despite the fact that he was much disliked, the death is thought to be accidental. But then the Beardons' next-door neighbours, two reclu- sive farming brothers, are attacked. Lilah, who loved her father, can't help noticing that her mother, Miranda, is hardly heart- broken, nor is her teenage brother Roddy, who hates the farm and who knows what Sam, the sleeping partner and abused labourer, really feels. Then there is Miran- da's best friend, Silvia. Is it possible that she hopes to be more than a friend to Miranda? There is the poisonous clergy- man who speaks bile rather than pleas- antries, and the charming Jonathan who sold the farm to Guy, and Guy's first wife who writes hoping to cash in on the death. Lastly there are the other village secrets, loves and hates which might be entwined with the escalating death count. Rebecca Tope writes nicely and delivers characters with believable emotions who are neither dull nor predictable. In fact, A Dirty Death is thoroughly entertaining — the best first crime novel I have read for a long time.
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