| There's something about the prospect of holidays spent with the people you love the most that drives readers across the world into the arms of serial killers, foul fiends, tortured detectives and innocents trapped in a world of evil. This year, crime fiction comes in every flavour imaginable. Pick yours. |
| The Lit lot: As with the band of brothers who swore that they read Playboy for the articles, there are crime fans who swear they read the stuff for the literary quality, not the cheap thrills. |
| They're the kind who read Pete Dexter, a writer who satisfies base blood lust as well as higher critical urges. |
| With Train, he sends his protagonist, a black golf caddie called Lionel Walk, into the murky world of murder, rape and robbery with violence. It's as cynical a riff on the mutability of morality as you would expect from Dexter. |
| Repentance, guilt and the consequences of inaction are the themes of Colin Harrison's The Havana Room. Harrison's protagonist is a successful lawyer who makes just one, hugely expensive mistake. He is sucked into the strange world of the Havana Room, a private club whose members conduct very unusual activities. |
| Also making waves is The Rule of Four, a thriller with familiar ingredients "" Ivy Leaguers with a penchant for murder, obscure manuscripts that hold the key to the riddle of who's bumping off whom and why. |
| Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason have been compared to Donna Tartt (she's better) and Dan Brown (they're better), but this one stands on its own feet. |
| Natsuo Kirino's Out is an unusually grim thriller set in the darker corners of Tokyo: a young woman employed in a factory that assembles box lunches kills her husband and recruits her friends in a bid to get rid of the corpse. |
| The friendships between the four women in the factory, the bleakness of their lives and the descent into darkness makes this an unforgettable book. |
| Besides, it gives you bragging rights: the next time some know-it-all asks you whether you've read Marukami's latest, explain that Haruki's been co-opted by the mainstream, and that you're into underground Jap lit now, as exemplified by Kirino. |
| Hard men, hard-boiled: For some, it's the detective in the mix that makes the fiction work. Donna Leon's detective, Commissario Guido Brunetti, comes from a long line of Chandleresque heroes with quirks intact. |
| He also listens to his wife, especially when her exposition of the Seven Deadly Sins might help him solve a murder in Venice, in Doctored Evidence. |
| Henning Mankell's investigator, Kurt Wallander, is a brooding Swedish cop with an eye for the growing alienation that plagues Sweden. (He has literary ancestors: Martin Beck, created by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo in 1965, witnessed the slow shift in the problems of Swedish culture a long while ago.) |
| Far more one-dimensional, but tediously long-lived, is Jonathan Kellerman's Alex Delaware. His ability to find corpses everywhere makes Delaware the kind of doctor I'd be a trifle wary of; anyway, he's back in Therapy, a so-so mystery that compensates with pace and a high body count for the increasingly bizarre motives of the killers. |
| Personally, I prefer Ian Rankin's Inspector Rebus to most of the new-wave detectives, because Rankin takes the usual stereotypes and adds a few new twists. Rebus drinks, smokes and has a nice line in caustic comebacks. |
| In A Question of Blood, he's a possible suspect in the death of a gangster, even as he attempts to unravel the puzzle behind a school shooting carried out by a former officer. |
| Serial killer soap opera: As another critic commented recently, this is the summer of the serial killer. |
| Of the newer entrants, one of the best is P J Tracy's Want to Play?, which features a serial killer whose modus operandi involves copying the virtual murders in a CD-ROM game. P J Tracy is the working name of a mother-daughter team who've done a good job of setting up believable characters with incredibly violent pasts. |
| Ruth Rendell's Rottweiler features a serial killer who leaves bites on his victims' bodies as a kind of calling card. Rendell, as usual, does a good job of exploring character and atmosphere, conjuring up a small community in London with effortless skill. |
| Patricia Cornwell's serial killer in Blow Fly illustrates what happens when a skilled crime writer sets herself the challenge of inventing even more gruesome twists and turns to an already convoluted plotline: she messes up, spectacularly. Her killer's USP in Blow Fly includes using body parts from discarded corpses as crocodile bait. |
| Jilliane Hoffman offers a spin on the usual story in Retribution, which involves serial rape of a particularly nasty order blended with serial killings, ditto. |
| But Michael Connelly leads the pack in The Narrows by doing what Thomas Harris had done before him with Hannibal Lecter: if you already have a great serial killer, bring him back. I had a soft spot for Connelly from the day he decided to call his detective Hieronymous "Harry" Bosch, and I'm quite happy to meet The Poet again. |
| The Poet, for non-Connelly fans, is the FBI profiler who found a second career that allowed him to indulge his taste for committing murder alongside a penchant for quoting Edgar Allen Poe, and The Narrows acquires a special chill from Connelly's decision to set several scenes from the Poet's viewpoint. |
| Two words: Dan Brown: It's beginning to look as though The Da Vinci Code will never shift off the bestseller lists, and as if you hadn't suffered a complete overdose of Dan Brown, there are at least two more of his books also riding the charts. |
| Angels and Demons is a sop for Da Vinci fans who can't get enough of the man. It features exquisite corpses (you can't get much more exquisite than a corpse with the word "Illuminati" branded on his chest), religious symbols galore, and pope-versus-pope plots in the Vatican. |
| Once you've got through this lot, you might indeed decide to go forth and sin no more. But the opposite extreme of the crime fiction genre would probably be the New Age soulfood genre, and there I'm not willing to venture, at any price! nilroy@lycos.com |
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