Review Virgin Heat by Lawrence Shames
Orion £16.99 and £9.99 Pbk
This novel offers the reader a Romeo and Juliet situation in that Angelina, the daughter of Mafia Capo Paul Amara, is in love with Sal Martucci, the man who betrayed her father and had him sent to prison.  Sal wisely disappeared and now has a new name, Ziggy Maxx, and a new face.  He hasn't thought about Angelina for years, but she has pined for him.
 The action starts when Angelina sees Sal on a family video.  She doesn't know his face, but she recognizes his hands when he is seen mixing a drink in a hotel in Key West.  Is this entirely plausible, one asks oneself. However one suspends one's disbelief and reads on.  Angelina decides to leave home and goes to Key West to find Sal.  She meets and befriends a young man called Michael who is gay.  He helps her to find Sal/Ziggy. Meanwhile Paul Amara is very perturbed at his daughter’s disappearance and follows her to Key West where he becomes involved with local mobsters. Paul eventually deduces what has happened which shows considerable but not entirely convincing perception on his part.  But, again, one reads on, mainly because of the interest generated by some of the characters - Michael, Angelina's Uncle Louie and his wife Rose, Paul Amara himself, the mobsters Mendez and Lucca, Keith and the various Federal agents and the mixed-up lovers, one hesitates to call them star-crossed, Angelina and Sal/Ziggy.  The story develops in short scenes of a page or so in which the author switches from one character or set of characters to another.  This ensures that our interest is maintained throughout. Nothing much happens in the book,  Indeed it could probably have been told as a short story, but Lawrence Shames expands it into a 262-page novel by assembling a diverse number of characters and exploring their lives and background in some depth.  He also gives a fascinating picture of life in Key West, particularly among the gay community.  His prose is racy and he has an acute ear for colloquial speech.  A good read.
JOHN BOYLES

Review Panicking Ralph by Bill James
Macmillan Crime Case £16.99
Ralph Ember is a minor criminal who owns a shady drinking club called The Monty.  On the death of a big-time drugs dealer, Kenward Knapp, Ember plans to set up his own drugs syndicate, despite the interest of rival criminals  Stan Stenfield and Keith Vine.  A complication arises when his meeting with his girl friend, Christine Tranter, on the lonely foreshore is disturbed by peeping toms who start shooting at them and Christine is killed.
This is the fourteenth novel in the Harpur and Iles series and Bill James, as always, focuses more attention on the criminals than he does on his detectives.  The criminals - Ember, the Panicking Ralph of the title, Vine and Stanfield, Beau Derek - are interesting enough, but so, too, are Detective Chief Superintendent Colin Harpur and Assistant Chief Countable Desmond Iles.  One sees little enough of Harpur and even less of Iles and this is a pity.  These are two contrasting characters and Iles in particular is a significant creation, a man who we are told always looks after the interests of Desmond Iles, a strange mixture of intimidation and charm.  Note how he switches from calling Harpur "Col" to "Harpur" and back again in the same paragraph of dialogue.  Perhaps Bill James feels that we, as readers, know all we need to know about these two men and does not wish to elaborate.  But readers like to see characters they are familiar with behaving in the way they expect and we could have done with more of Harpur and Iles in the book and rather less of the criminals. Harpur comes into the plot more when he tries to infiltrate the Vine-Stanfield team.  It is a dangerous game and he feels the need to write a letter of explanation to Iles, but the ACC never sees it and the matter fizzles out towards the end. One final note.  Some of the characters make literary and other allusions which are not entirely convincing.  Would Vine be aware of the Nazis and the burning of books?  And would Iles really say, "Whenever I hear the words 'popular culture' I reach for my Rilke"?  But at least there are no embarrassing literary quotations which seem increasingly to appear in some modern mystery novels, even those of some of our most respected authors.  Bill James tells a good story and writes well. JOHN BOYLES

Review No Place Of Safety by Robert Barnard
Harper Collins - £14.99
When two teenagers who attend the same school go missing, Detective Constable Charlie Peace sets out to discover whether the disappearances are linked. At first it seems that there is no connection between Alan Coughlan and Katy Bourne and when the two of them turn out to be safe from harm, working at a hostel for homeless juveniles, that appears to close the case.  But there is an unexpected and intriguing link between the youngsters and the apparently altruistic man who has established the hostel, Ben Marchant and before too long Charlie discovers it. At first there seems to be no cause for concern, but matters take a different turn after a double stabbing at the hostel. Ben is one of the victims; the other is a girl called Mehjebean Haldalwa. Could racism be the motive for the attack - or something else?
Robert Barnard has a well-deserved reputation for originality and his latest novel, like its predecessors, is full of sharp observations. One of his particular strengths lies in the  depiction of young people and this book,like The Masters In The House, the last-but-one Barnard novel, demonstrates his ability to portray them sympathetically and yet without sentiment. Ben Marchant is a fascinating individual and the final paragraph of the book contains not a plot twist but an insight into his character which I found both chilling and plausible.  Charlie Peace is a likeable if low-key policeman who has developed into Barnard's principal series detective and he does his usual competent investigative job. The mystery element is, however, subordinate: here, as in his last book, The Bad Samaritan, Barnard appears  to be focusing more on people than on plot. There is less comedy in his work these days than in his early books, but he continues to write brisk and appealing mysteries that are as readable as any around. Martin Edwards

 Review The Usual Suspects by Christopher McQuarrie
Faber and Faber  £7.99 pbk
Bryan Singer's film "The Usual Suspects" is one of the most gripping thrillers of the 1990s and we now have the chance to read the screenplay, which is accompanied by a worthwhile introduction. The latter takes the form of an interview of writer Christopher McQuarrie by Todd Lippy and, amongst other things, it tells the story of how the screenplay came to be written - in bits and pieces. The title came first, along with the idea that the movie would be about "a bunch of criminals who meet in a police lineup". A poster - of all things - was then designed before McQuarrie pitched the idea to the director - "pulling my ideas from my environment." McQuarrie claims that his arch-villain, the mysterious Keyser Soze, is not really evil - "he had no choice but to do what he did, given the life that he had assumed" and describes a real-life murder case that provided part of the inspiration for the character. The structure of the screenplay is complex, with much to- and fro-ing between past and present. McQuarrie defends his heavy use of flashbacks: "there's a ton of information to digest in this script - you're never once given a break - and using flashbacks seemed like the best way to get it across." This is a thought-provoking comment and, certainly, this is an example of a film in which the use of flashbacks seems both natural and inevitable. McQuarrie does not mention it, and may not even be aware of it, but he also makes use of a narrative technique which Anton Chekhov and Agatha Christie have both famously used in the telling of a mystery story - and his spin on an old device is again highly successful. One of the fascinating things for any fan of the film about reading the script is that it offers the chance to see where the former diverges from the latter. There's a good deal of meat in the story; it is a movie that bears watching a number of times. The screenplay is well worth reading for its own sake, but it will be of most interest to those who have relished the silver screen version of the tale about the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled: convincing the world he didn't exist. Martin Edwards  

 Review The Second Wycliffe Omnibus by W. J. Burley
Gollancz - £16.99
The television series about Superintendent Charles Wycliffe has been one of the most popular of recent years and has given Mr Burley's Cornwall-based books a new lease of life. The dustjacket predictably portrays Jack Shepherd, a talented actor perhaps surprisingly cast as Wycliffe. Shepherd has always struck me as a powerful performer, but he is surely right to give a restrained performance in this role, for there is nothing flashy about Wycliffe, one of the most sober and responsible of all fictional cops of the modern era. The choice of titles in this collection is not entirely easy to fathom. The series is long-running, and one might have expected that a chronological approach would have been adopted when the opportunity for reprints presented itself. However, Gollancz have included one novel which dates back to 1976, together with two published within the last six years. "Wycliffe and the Schoolgirls" is the earliest of the three, "Wycliffe and the Dead Flautist" and "Wycliffe and the Last Rites" the more recent. Given the space in time which separates the book, they are notably consistent in approach and mood: one remembers that Burley was influenced by Simenon and has often been compared to him. The contrast between this series and that featuring those other television favourites, Dalziel and Pascoe, is striking. Whereas Reginald Hill goes to great lengths to achieve variety in approach (although never just for the sake of it), Burley has been content, ever since he hit his stride in detective writing (his first series, about a zoologist and amateur detective called Henry Pym, never really took off) to concentrate on what he does best. That is, he constructs solid, readable mysteries, eschewing any form of gimmickry. After a long career, he has, in his eighties, entered the Premier League of crime writers and, like Ellis Peters not so long ago, he richly deserves his success. Martin Edwards