Review:
 Victims by Robert Richardson 
Gollancz Pbk Original £9.99
 A thirty-page prologue of three short segments opens with the brutal killing of three adults and two children at a remote Suffolk farm near the village of Finch.  The second segment reveals the killer, Giles Lambert and his accomplice Randall Jowett, both Cambridge undergraduates.  Giles is unrepentant,  Randall is tormented by guilt.  The third segment, "Aftermath", shows the break between the two men:  Randall wants "out", as he puts it, and leaves all the spoils of the robbery to Giles who looks on his friend as a "loser".
Six years pass.  Chapter One begins on page 36.  It introduces Joyce Hetherington, once the "glossy trophy wife" of an up and coming business man, but now older and neglected and bored with her lot and her wealthy husband who has made no secret of the fact that he has a mistress in their London flat.  She lives in Finch and has a holiday cottage for rent and Randall Jowett books it for a short stay. The accomplice, still guilt-wracked, has returned to the scene of the crime.  He hardly knows why he has come back.  Is it for some form of forgiveness, as implied in the twinning of Finch with a German town?  The people of Finch are taken by the quietly spoken, handsome stronger, none more so than Joyce.  They embark on an affair, physical at first on her part, which develops into a love likely to threaten the foundations of her crumbling marriage.
Victims is not a detective novel nor a mystery nor even a thriller.  It can only be categorised as a crime novel and one keeps turning the pages because one is interested in how the plot is going to work out.  Will the two men be caught or will they escape justice? The resolution is carefully and plausibly handled, with Joyce the unwitting instrument.
The book is aptly titled.  All the leading characters are, in one way or another, victims, particularly Joyce and Randall.  She is very attractive and is sympathetically drawn, as is Randall, despite his involvement with the murders at the farm.  Robert Richardson is one of the best writers of crime fiction in our time.  He uses words sensitively and well and his book is a compulsive read.
John Boyles
A TW Recommended Title

 Review: 
Perils of the Night by Patricia Hall.
Constable Crime £16.99
Laura Ackroyd is a reporter on the Bradfield Gazette.  She takes on an assignment from her editor to go underground in Whitley Street in the city's notorious red light district and poses as a prostitute on the very evening when there is a confrontation between the prostitutes and a group of mainly Asian vigilantes.  Laura ends up in the cells, to the embarrassment of her lover, Detective Chief Inspector Michael Thackeray.
It is on this same night that a murder takes place in Whitley Street. The victim is a young student, Louise Brorwnlow, a lodger in the house of another student, Roz Jenkins.  Louise was working hard for her exams and was a regular churchgoer. but it emerges that she is several months pregnant and had worked as a prostitute.  Thackeray discovers that her lover is the local vicar, Miles Bateman, a supporter of the vigilantes. Bateman is at first hostile and stands on his dignity as a local celebrity, but as soon as his guilty secret is revealed he wilts under  questioning and tries to kill himself, to the chagrin of Thackeray's superior.
A second person is murdered in Whitley Street during another demonstration.  He is the vicious pimp of the waif-like Gassy.  Is this second murder connected with the first?  The police are uncertain, as is the reader, such is the skill with which Patricia Hall plots her novel. Thackeray and Laura are forced to go their separate ways in search of a solution.  Laura ventures as far afield as London and they both journey separately to Derbyshire to interview Jane Watson, a friend of Louise and also a lodger at the Jenkins house in Whitley Street.  The investigation is a strain for them both and they often find themselves at odds with each other, but their relationship is sensitively handled by the author and their mutual regard is wholly convincing.
Perils of the Night is aptly titled.  The action takes piece mostly in a bleak northern city of grey wintry days and cold dark nights.  The gloom is unrelieved, as befits a novel like this.  Patricia Hall is familiar with her Bradfield and evokes it in neat effective touches.  Moreover she writes fluently and well and the reader is forced to keep turning the page.  A very good read.
John Boyles

 Review:
 Giovanni’s Gift by Bradford Morrow.
Flamingo £16.99
Edmé and Henry Fulton live contentedly on their solitary ranch of Ash Creek, almost totally disengaged from the outside world, until, throughout one terrible Autumn, their tranquil existence is torn apart by the malicious presence of the night visitors, announcing their arrival with raucous music played in the dead of night, and disturbing not only the Fultons' sleep, but also the serenity of their lives, making long-settled waters murky and bringing to the surface troubles long buried and calmed, if not forgotten.
Grant Morgan, Henry's nephew, returns to Ash Creek to offer his help to the only family and home he has. Ash Creek, Edmé and Henry are the one stable part of Grant's wandering life, and to see them threatened is almost unbearable, as if the foundation stones of his precariously balanced life are failing.  He is determined to solve the mystery of the unspoken but tangible threats made against his aunt and uncle.
Events begin to escalate, however, much quicker than anyone anticipated.  Grant becomes involved with Helen, the daughter of Giovanni Trentas, a close friend of his aunt and uncle.  Giovanni had died 3 years ago in tragic circumstances and his daughter remains convinced that he was murdered - for what reasons she does not know.  Grant's involvement with Helen makes him want to solve this puzzle  He finds his relationship is disapproved of by his uncle.  He does not know why, only guessing that it has something to do with Giovanni, although why his uncle should object to the daughter of his best
friend he cannot understand..  The night visits become more menacing, intimidation rather than a nuisance like a fly to be simply swatted away, and Henry receives a cryptic note which exhorts him to "tell the truth".
Although seemingly unconnected, Grant begins to link these events together, and when Edmé gives him an old cigar box containing the personal legacy of Giovanni he ignores her advice not to open the box and delves into Giovanni's past in the hope that the battered old box will hold the key to the puzzles surrounding him.  Giovanni's box, however. before it offers up its solutions, tangles Grant even further in a spider's web of questions and possible answers, many of which seem inconceivable.
The town's most prominent inhabitants appear to be involved in a devious twist of secrets, built around the figures of Giovanni Trentas and his daughter, Henry Fulton, and the sinister personality of Graham Tate, a property developer and his wife, Willa. Grant's explorations open up wounds within this community which have festered for years and are only now being brought out into the open.  Like Pandora's Box, Giovanni's box only barely contains the truth about the dark network of lies running through the community and once opened releases a myriad of forces which have grown in strength during their imprisonment.  A violence and hatred erupts which seems destined to triumph and  which will only cease when all of the town’s hidden mysteries are solved. however tragic that conclusion may be.
Giovanni’s Gift is a maze of a thriller in which the reader becomes as confused and bewildered as Grant at the seemingly endless twists and turns of events and personalities, a novel which keeps the reader alert and guessing, trying to piece together the many parts of the puzzle.
Charlotte Winham

Review: 
Dead in the Market by David Williams.
HarperCollins Pbk £5.99
David Williams has written a string of detective fiction and his Dead in the Market is the third in a recent series featuring two Welsh detectives and set very firmly in Cardiff and the Welsh countryside.  It is a sure-footed book which swings along nicely for most of the time at an amiable pace.  The change of gear at the end, which could have become Keystone Cops, is well handled, and doesn’t!
Motives for the events in the book are apparent and credible.
David Williams creates a broad range of characters, some more realistic than others but all described in considerable detail.  This sometimes leads to a rather ponderous effect as in the first meeting with “Mr Corbin Hobson” who is in fact Ifor Dafydd Owen-Pugh DD, MA, the founder of the Free Church Mission of Achievers for Jesus, “The delay was caused by the newcomer’s determination to extract his left leg from whatever was seriously impeding it in the bowels of the car, while, at the same time, attempting, with both hands , to cram a wide-brimmed Panama hat over well-groomed wavy hair, growing to nearly shoulder length.”  But I realise that the effect is intentionally comic, and that some readers will find it impressive rather than over-written.
Of the characters, Perdita, the enthusiastically  coy girlfriend of Chief Inspector Parry, is probably the least convincing.  Dialogue is well handled.
This book does the job it sets out to, although the cover is awful and seems to bear no relation  to the contents.  Perhaps it’s symbolic, but if so, what are the pair of lemons doing?  I quite enjoyed it, and as a demonstration of the cosy genre, it’s good.
Jill Allam

Review: 
Unnatural Exposure  by Patricia Cornwell. 
Little Brown £16.99
Dr Kay Scarpetta  returns, in a  novel which will delight the many fans of this author and her forensic  pathologist  heroine.  Cornwell’s previous departure from her established  formula for success, “Hornet’s Nest”, did not receive the unqualified praise that has been heaped on her seven other Scarpetta  Mysteries/Thrillers.  “Unnatural Exposure” is, however, another sure winner. 
The plot - a serial killer at work, dismembered bodies  in Ireland  several years ago and now similar crimes in  Dr Scarpetta’s home state of Virginia – but this time with an added ingredient – bodies which  bear the characteristic signs of smallpox – and a  murderer who  establishes a very scary series of communications with Kay Scarpetta through her computer e-mail – provide a story line which carries the potential for much horror and suspense and detailed descriptions of scenes in mortuaries and laboratories which are not for the squeamish.
It is in her skill at creating the territory through which her protagonist moves, though, which puts her in a league above the ordinary competent writer.
This time the opening scene of crime is a monstrous landfill site –  a nightmare scenario where a continuous stream of gigantic trucks dump tons of urban rubbish every day, “Caterpillars with rampant blades and buckets immobile at the summit”.  The first gruesome torso emerges from a torn black plastic bag and Scarpetta arrives and puts on a surgical mask to carry out her  investigations.
Other eerie locations are expertly evoked as the book progresses – underground  corridors and laboratories - sites inhabited by  government secret agents with  a  proliferation of the very latest high-tech hardwear -  a bleak  and isolated island where the second diseased  and mutilated corpse is found. An experiment conducted with her niece Lucy in the ways of utilising computer technology to discover the identity of  the murderer  will make you gasp and shudder. The description of the landing  of an Army Blackhawk  on a moonlit night will have you seeing and hearing and feeling the blades and the noise and the power of the machine.
Relationships between Scarpetta and other familiar characters from the previous books continue to develop and provide interest.  Pete Marino, commander of the city police department’s homicide squad, has descended even more into his  unhealthy and slobbish lifestyle, Kay Scarpetta continues to look out for him and seems to have a genuine fondness for the man which reads more convincingly than her romantic liaison with her FBI lover, Benton Wesley. She still agonises over the problems that Lucy and her woman lover face because of their relationship and  the dominance of men in the area of work they have chosen. She faces similar problems herself.
You would have to go a long way to find a more intelligent, compassionate and classy heroine. “Unnatural Exposure”  may well be considered the best Scarpetta story yet.
PED
A TW Recommended Title