Tangled Web UK Review July 1998
File Updated: 30/03/00
Deception on his Mind Deception on his Mind by Elizabeth George
pbk out June 98 (Coronet) at £5.99
CRIME PAPERBACKS FOR SUMMER 1998 by Andrew Taylor
 (A version of this first appeared in The Independent on 4th July 1998)
James Lee Burke’s Cimarron Rose The Wire in the Blood(Orion, £5.99) provides a superbly atmospheric glimpse of small-town America through noir spectacles. A lawyer struggles to defend a teenager accused of rape and murder, and in the process reveals much about himself and about Texas, a state of mind as well as a state of the Union.
On the other side of the Atlantic, Arturo Perez-Reverte’s The Seville Communion (Harvill, £10.99) opens with a hacker breaking into the Pope’s computer. An excellent crime novel, mixing detection with theology, flamenco dancing and mouth-watering descriptions of Seville.
Frances Fyfield’s Without Consent (Corgi, £5.99) is an elegant, beautifully constructed thriller exploring aspects of rape - definitions, perpetrators, victims, the forensics, the prosecution, and, above all, the shades of guilt. All the more effective for the shafts of wit illuninating this grim subject. Val McDermid’s The Wire in the Blood (HarperCollins, £5.99) pits a criminal profiler against a psychopath with a taste for teenage girls. Tense, unflinching and shocking; includes a wicked portrait of the marriage of two TV presenters. Jeffrey Deaver’s The Bone Collector (NEL, £6.99) is almost equally powerful, though less realistic - Deaver’s protagonists are a quadriplegic ex-police forensic scientist and a beautiful rookie cop.
Gentler pleasures are on offer in The Oxford Book of English Detective Stories (Oxford Paperbacks, £8.99). Patricia Craig has assembled a fine anthology of short stories, from Conan Doyle via the usual suspects to P.D.James, Rendell, Keating, Barnard, Reginald Hill and Simon Brett. First-rate entertainment.
For the beach book try Elizabeth George’s Deception on His Mind (NEL, £6.99). Themes hit you over the head like blunt instruments, but it’s very readable and, at 754 pages, very long. Unnatural Death (Warner, £5.99), where the killer’s favourite weapon is smallpox, may not be Patricia Cornwell’s best book, but if nothing else you are guaranteed a nice class of corpse.
Finally, two recommendations for those with a taste for corpses but not for fiction. In Midnight in Sicily (Harvill, £12.00), Peter Robb writes brilliantly about the cycle of violence in Southern Italy in an ultimately unclassifiable book that melds politics, the Mafia, travel writing, autobiography and serious cooking. The Jigsaw Man (Corgi, £6.99) is the story of Paul Britton, a forensic psychologist with an unusual ability to “walk through minds”. Workmanlike, unsensational prose heightens accounts of cases such as the kidnapping of Abbie Humphreys and the murder of Jamie Bulger.

( Andrew Taylor - author of the highly acclaimed Roth & Lydmouth Series)

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