A selection of recent thrillers
Harriet Waugh
Somehow I missed Nicci French's first novel, The Memory Game, but having just read her second, The Safe House (Michael Joseph, £10, pp. 310) I will certainly catch up with it.
The heroine of The Safe House, Dr Samantha Laschen, is a single mother and a consultant psychiatrist specialising in post-traumatic stress. She is a feminist with cropped hair, who likes outlandish clothes and has myopia regarding her own inability to sustain closeness with her boyfriend Danny. When the novel opens she has left London to try to provide a more cosy life for her little daughter Elsie in a flat, barren landscape by the sea and is about to take up a job running a new department in the provincial town of Stamford. She is asked by the local police if she will have a trau- matised young woman to stay whose wealthy parents have been brutally mur- dered in their home. The daughter, Finn, was left for dead with her throat cut and remembers nothing. The police suspect animal rights activists of the crime and think the girl might still be vulnerable.
To begin with all seems well. Finn gradu- ally comes out of her static state, is good at playing with Elsie, and turns out to be a real home-maker, but there is a threat and it is difficult to know where it is coming from. By the end Sam, with everything that she holds dear close to being destroyed, has to battle for her life alone. This is a strong, atmospheric and intelligent thriller.
Sue Grafton has now reached N in her series of Kinsey Millhone mysteries. Will she disappear from us when Z is finally reached? I hope not. N is for Noose (Macmillan, £16, pp. 312) is not the best- plotted of her novels (I had guessed the vil- lain of the piece very early on) but it is one of the most enjoyable. Kinsey, unlike most redoubtable heroines of detective fiction, is not made of india rubber. In this one she feels out of her element, vulnerable, miser- able and frightened. On top of all this she fails to solve the mystery and instead (par for the course) nearly loses her life. It should have been a cushy job. She is hired by a widow to find out why her policeman husband dropped dead from a heart attack. The widow, a foolish woman, felt that her husband was anxious and depressed before he died. After a week or so on the job, Kin- sey comes to the conclusion that the police- man's death was the only natural one around!
Frances Fyfield is an uneven writer. Sometimes, as in her novel Playroom, which she wrote under the name Frances Hegarty, she achieves tension and psycho- logical integrity within a profoundly inter- esting and disturbing story. At other times, I have been put off by her heroine, a grim female lawyer called Helen West, whose private concerns slow the action. Blind Date (Bantam, £15.99, pp. 315), however, dispenses with Helen West's services and is, although not entirely believable, very enjoyable. It starts with a prologue in which a woman is kicked to death in her home by someone whom she knows while her little boy watches television upstairs. The rest of the novel starts about a year later. The heroine, Elisabeth Kennedy, is the pretty woman's half-sister. A disgraced ex-police- woman, she is angry, embittered and par- tially crippled by having had acid thrown at her. Drunk at the time of the attack, she lay in it and so the acid not only hit the side of her face and neck but also burned her arm, thigh and spine to the bone. Her dis- grace was caused because she was part of a sting operation against the suspect serial killer of her sister. The case was thrown out of court and was criticised severely by the judge. The reader knows in a muffled sort of way who is the killer. The tension rises as you see him moving in on a group of Elisabeth's friends and realise that it is only a matter of time before he kills Elisabeth who, against all advice, returns to London to live in a semi-derelict church tower. She has, though, without realising it, a romanti- cally-minded protector in Joe, a photogra- pher, who has been asked to keep an eye on her by her ex-police chief. The plot as it develops lacks credibility but there is a nice twist and the atmosphere is compelling. This is a thoroughly enjoyable piece of hokum.
I was relieved to find that in Simon Brett's new novel Dead Room Farce (Gol- lancz, £16.99, pp 224), Charles Paris, the alcoholic actor-hero, is safely out of the gutter and in a new farce called Not On Your Wife, written by the prolific writer Bill Blunden, and acted by popular star Bernard Walton. Charles plays the lover in a cupboard with his trousers round his knees. The play is doing a three-month try- out in the provinces and looks set to go to the West End when Charles' curious, lazy and befuddled conscience causes him to start probing the death of his old friend Mark, who appears to have suffocated by accident in his studio in Bath shortly after Charles and his fellow thespians have done a promotional recording there. Skeletons are rattled, Charles' love life does not bear thinking about, he is on the wagon and he suspects the star of murder. Simon Brett delivers as nice a hbdge-podge of comic gloom as fans of Charles Paris could possi- bly want.
Maureen O'Brien has in Kate Creech a particularly engaging heroine. She is an actress who has led a mildly ramshackle life and in Mask of Betrayal (Constable, £16.99, pp. 238) it returns to haunt her in a pecu- liarly nasty way when the bloated, stinking body of a murdered woman is found in the bath of her London house. Luckily for her she has an unshakeable alibi, acting Medea in the provinces. Although Kate claims to Inspector John Bright, Maureen O'Brien's detective, that she does not recognise the corpse, she is extremely worried. She has given the key of the house to quite a few friends and one of them has long, black hair like the corpse and, for that matter, herself. Was she the intended victim? And where is her long, dark-haired new-ager friend Tess? Kate investigates while John Bright stalks her. The plot is nicely convo- luted and Kate has some nasty emotional shocks. Mask of Betrayal is slightly marred by uncomfortably small print, but don't be put off.
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