A choice of recent thrillers
Harriet Waugh
t his best Michael Dibdin's crime novels have run the gamut of the laugh- aloud heartless cynicism of Dirty Tricks to the grisly humour of The Dying of the Light in which demented old people get knocked off and abused in a home while a para- noiac, half-demented old biddy solves the case. However, leavening this blackness is a series of detective novels starring his irrev- erent, not very successful, Machiavellian, Italian police detective, Aurelio Zen. Somehow descriptions of Zen have always escaped me and I imagined him to be not very tall (around five foot six), with brown eyes, olive skin, dark hair gone grey and slightly soft and rounded. Now, in Blood Rain (Faber, £16.99), which is possibly the last of the series, he turns out to be tall and gaunt — not the expected description of a man involved in a soft-shoe shuffle through life.
Over the years Zen's pursuit of the truth has been subverted by a wish to please an important man here and there in order to facilitate his career. Although this has not always made his unmasking of villainy entirely straightforward, it has given an added satisfaction when he finally fingers the right collars at the end of the day. However, in his last appearance, in A Long Finish, he did not, to this reader's indigna- tion, even do that. Now, in Blood Rain, his machinations have finally failed him. His career is on the skids. Against his wishes he finds himself in a dead-end job in corrupt and dangerous Sicily.
His 'adopted' daughter (a computer expert whom he met in A Long Finish) has taken a job in the Ministry of Justice to get to know him better. They meet for break- fast every day in a cafe bar, but they are not at ease with each other. Then Zen is told that his mother is dying in a Roman hospital, and in his anxiety to rush off to her bedside he fails to notice that strange things are happening in the Ministry of Jus- tice which involve his 'daughter' and a female anti-Mafia judge, Corinna Nunzi- atella. The judge is investigating the death of a man found in an abandoned railway wagon who is thought to be the son of a prominent Mafia boss, but her work is being sabotaged by the ministry. Mean- while, Zen travels to Rome and goes a little mad. In fact he remains a little mad throughout the remainder of the novel, and I never quite understood what he was up to. Despite this, for those who have fol- lowed Zen's fortunes Blood Rain is a must. For other readers I am not so sure.
In recent years I have opened each new Sara Paretsky novel with a mild groan, but Hard Time (Hamish Hamilton, £15.99) goes a long way to rehabilitate her. Her heroine, V. I. Warshawslci, is still the same, unhappy, uncomfortably butch middle- aged broad who swats the reader with her angry dislike of anyone in corporate or public life while making ill-judged demands on her friends. On the other hand, for the first time in years not every- one sitting round a swimming pool is a vil- lain — only some. Lastly, perhaps for diplomatic reasons, Sara Paretsky eases up on her well-documented dislike of the Catholic church and introduces a good priest.
Hard Time has V. I. taking on an enter- tainment conglomerate on discovering a dead, battered young woman in her head- lights. Shortly afterwards she is arrested on trumped-up charges. She is sent on remand to an extremely tough, badly run women's prison. Perhaps not unexpectedly she fits in well there, becoming almost likeable as she takes on villainous warders. Altogeth- er, Hard Time is an exciting, well-plotted and mellower novel than those of the last few years.
Stephen Dobyns' Boy in the Water (Viking, £9.99) is set in New Hampshire. Jim Hawthorne, emotionally vulnerable after losing his family in a fire, is appointed headmaster to a failing private school for disturbed teenagers. He has about six months to turn it round before the gover- nors close it. He finds a hostile teaching 'But today's undergraduates lack dm.' body, some of whom play nasty psychologi- cal tricks on him. There is also a new chef (very good at making bread) who the read- er knows is a murderous psychopath who has been hired by somebody to do some- thing unpleasant. Then, after mounting cri- sis, a boy is found drowned in the swimming pool.
Boy in the Water follows Stephen Dobyns' masterpiece, The Church of Dead Girls, and so, perhaps inevitably, is a disappointment. However, after a weak start the novel gathers excitement and, if not as distinguished as its predecessor, is enjoyably many-stranded.
In 0 is for Outlaw (Macmillan, £9.99), Kinsey Millhone, Sue Grafton's gutsy but not invulnerable female detective, finds herself excavating her own past and failed marriage when she buys a load of her old papers from a scavenger of defaulted stor- age units. Because of what she finds in the box she goes on a quest looking for her divorced husband, an ex-cop, whom she finds dying of gunshot wounds in a hospi- tal. Fourteen years earlier she had left him because she believed he had killed a man and got away with it; now she is not so sure. By the end of the novel she is investi- gating three murders that take her back to the Vietnam war and then forward to the present, which for Kinsey is 1986. This is as thoroughly satisfying a detective novel as any Sue Grafton has written.
Rebecca Tope follows her excellent first novel, A Dirty Death, with Dark Undertak- ings (Piatkus, £17.99), introducing trainee undertaker Drew Slocombe as an amateur detective. I was attracted by the cover showing a fetching West Highland terrier, who, during his brief appearance, suffers neglect and then accidental poisoning when he licks the face of his master, 55-year-old Jim Lapsford, dead of a supposed heart attack that exercises Drew Slocombe when he comes to take the body to the funeral parlour. He has only a few days before the cremation to prove foul play and the sus- pects are endless. There are the unloving two sons, the not so sad widow, at least two mistresses, cuckolded husbands and his workmates. Even the woman who owns the funeral parlour behaves in a peculiar way. Drew is not a very sensitive investiga- tor, but even he has moments of nerve failure. Fun.
Set in 1906, Frederick Forsyth's Phantom of Manhattan (Bantam Press, £12.99) is not so much a thriller as an amusing gothic pastiche. He takes the phantom of the Phantom of the Opera to New York and sets him up as a troubled, reclusive multi- millionaire bent on exacting revenge on the world, until he learns at the deathbed of a French woman, who had befriended him all those years ago when he haunted the Paris opera house, a wonderful but terrible secret. This must have been fun to write and is fun to read, and I do not think it harms the novella to say that at least some of the characters live happily ever after.
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