Thrillers
Dial ex for murder
Harriet Waugh
Murder in Paradise by Ann Cleeves (Century, £10.95, pp.181), while not the best crime novel I have read this year, is the best detective novel. This is Ann Cleeves's third and it stars, as do her others, a not particularly likeable detec- tive. He is a retired Home Office sleuth and amateur ornithologist. His niggling, sour personality, coupled with an obsessive determination to get to the bottom of things, makes him able to diagnose murder where more relaxed folk might not.
The novel is set somewhere up north, on the windswept island of Kinness. The islanders are clannish and on the rough side. Palmer-Jones (our man) has arrived to do a little bird-spotting and is staying with the disgruntled village teacher and his pretty, bored wife whose mildly flirtatious manners are the cause of scandal. A young, idealistic, city bride, called Sarah, has also come to Kinness. At her wedding celebrations (she has married an islander) her sly, deaf, retarded 12-year-old sister- in-law falls to her death from the cliffs. Since she is not an especially attractive child, nobody (with the exception of her parents) cares much about her death, which passes off as an accident. Palmer- Jones, however, does not think it is accidental and enlists Sarah's help as she, like him, is an outsider. The islanders turn out to be torn by dark passions, secrets and feuds and before Palmer-Jones exposes the murderer, two other deaths occur.
The strength of Ann Cleeves's novel lies in the prose. She writes nicely and her characters do not come out of the stock- cupboard. They are unusually realistic and gritty, while their grim lifestyle, at the mercy of the weather and undernourished farm land, gives an authority usually mis- sing in a novel of this kind. Lighter in tone and highly enjoyable is Jennifer Rowe's Grim Pickings (Century, £11.95, pp.292). Rowe is an Australian and this is her first detective novel. The plot revolves around that old favourite, the family gathering. Aunt Alice, in her eight- ies, is the reluctant hostess each year of her niece's family and their friends who come to pick her apples in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales. In their wake comes trouble. The niece, an over-maternal mother of grown-up children, wages a none too subtle war on her children's spouses. So, when her beautiful daughter's ex-husband drops in, sparks begin to fly. Who is he making a play for? His ex? (She certainly thinks so). Or the wife of the son's best friend? (Her husband believes so and storms out). Why are things missing from the house? Is Aunt Alice going ga-ga? Has the son's wife been driven dangerously mad by her mother-in-law, and what is the secret of the young widow and her baby — Aunt Alice's nearest neighbours? Kate, who is also staying at the house with her husband and small daughter, ponders and reacts to these tensions. When a body is found in the garden, nobody is very surprised, certainly not the reader. There are a good many twists and turns to the plot as well as a few more attempted murders before the killer is exposed (in a highly satisfactory man- ner). Jennifer Rowe has given us an unusually old-fashioned, well-plotted story. They come all too rarely.
A Special Kind of Nightmare by Paul Geddes (Bodley Head, £10.95, pp.224) is a murder mystery bordering on a spy- thriller. Mansell, the second-in-command at the Central Crimes Bureau, which in- vestigates fraud in business and high places, becomes uneasy when he reads that a prostitute has died crashing her car in Harley Street after having received some over-rough treatment during bondage sex with a customer. He suspects, for fairly
'Bad trip?'
good reasons, that his boss, Antrim, who lives in Harley Street, was the client. If so, he feels that it really will not do, as it makes Antrim vulnerable to blackmail. He therefore consults Fender, the ex-director of the Bureau. Fender is an eccentric, prudish, fat Catholic who is only too pleased to get involved. They recruit the help of Antonia, a Bureau investigator and an ex-girlfriend of Antrim who is looking into the suspicious suicide of another Bureau employee. Before dying, the latter had been investigating Antrim's rela- tionship with a shifty business mogul. This leads the three to suspect that the cases might be related and to start querying the death from Aids of a prominent, anti- English, Irish politician.
If this sounds complicated, it is, but it is also jolly good. The novel is well written, the relationships between the characters interesting and the solution satisfactory. It does have one fault, however. A good deal of the pleasure of reading detective novels lies in the fact that the detective (Fender in this case) is the only person to work out the salient facts, and to dazzle all those in- volved when he discloses them. In A Special Kind of Nightmare, the author undermines Fender's achievement by al- lowing the British Government and the CIA to arrive at the same conclusion independently. I hope that Mr Geddes, who tells an excellent, exciting and com- plex story, never lets the reader down in such a way again!
The private detective in Linda Barnes's A Trouble of Fools (Hodder, £10.95, pp.208) is a very tall female ex-Boston cop called Carlotta Carlyle. She thinks she is into celibacy and volleyball but all too easily succumbs to an ex-boyfriend who looks like being connected, in the wrong sort of way, with her case. This involves a missing cab driver, her elderly sister who is beaten up, a dubious fortune found hidden in an attic, the IRA, drug-pushing and the Mafia. Carlotta is a likeable detective, and she wraps it all up, after some entertaining twists, in a theatrically enjoyable manner.
Jessica Mann's pretty, intellectual Gov- ernment undercover agent, Tamara Hoy- land, is art old favourite of mine. This time, in Death Beyond the Nile (Macmillan, £9.95, pp.191), she is rather inefficiently minding an emotionally unstable female scientist on a cruise down the Nile when a rash of murders breaks out. The first victim is the new, bitchy inamorata of the scien- tist's ex-boyfriend whom she has followed to Egypt. So Tamara decides she should sort it out. The plot is excellent but the flow is marred by the action being viewed from three different angles. There is Tamara's account, after it is almost over, to her boss back home, interspersed with some straightforward narrative and ex- tracts from a diary kept by one of the members of the cruise. The mixture is a little distracting, although one does still want to know how it will end.
Previous page
