Review
The Crediton Killings by Michael Jecks
Headline £17.99
Michael Jecks has created an impressively authentic mediaeval world in this exciting murder mystery. These are the times of the Knights Templar and the Holy Crusades, where the church has political and martial power. The stenches of foods, industry, humans and their primitive sewers perfectly evoke a town busy with craftsmen, purveyors of food and drink, and folk bustling about their daily lives. The population is divided by feudal hierarchy into Church dignitaries and knights, lords and squires, servants and beggars - with the exception of the lawless and dangerous band of mercenaries who descend upon the town's inn.
Within this setting, our hero Sir Baldwin, veteran crusader, bailiff and magistrate rolled into one, must resolve the theft of a large quantity of silver plate and the murder of a tavern serving girl. The plate belongs to Sir Hector, the aggressive leader of the mercenaries, and the serving girl, Sarra, briefly his mistress, may have witnessed the crime. The professional warriors are unruly and unco-operative - a bailiffs worst nightmare.  Sir Baldwin's investigation proves difficult as he follows clues which seem to lead in circles. Sir Baldwin tries to gain vital information from a whole cast of characters who appear untrustworthy or just plain ignorant of events.  When useful information does come to light it is frustratingly difficult to place into the jigsaw puzzle.  While Sir Baldwin ponders the truth, the number of murders of young townswomen begins to mount up. As the times passes quickly by the need to find the killer becomes more imperative. We are granted an anonymous insight into the mind of this person as he waits in the shadows watching the bailiff and his colleagues piece things together. This mystery person has his own agenda. His machinations thread through the investigation making it impossible for reader and bailiff alike to distinguish what is true and what is false.
This is an exciting and fast moving novel. The plot keeps the reader on his toes to the very end with subplots and numerous red herrings. All the loose ends are eventually accounted for and tied up in a satisfying denouement. This is a book to miss at your own peril!
Julia Cuddihy

Review
The Book of Dead Authors by Emlyn Rees
Review Pbk Original £9.99
Serial killer novel with quite a difference - thank God! Actually even that is misleading. If Mr. Rees has ever read a serial killer novel, he hasn't let it affect him. You'll find few of the fashionable trappings of the genre here. He  has other, more literary, things on his mind: a rather romantic notion of the seriousness and purity of the writer's craft, for one thing; the unfashionable  idea that bad novels drive out the good, for another. Mr. Rees , whose first novel this is, "works in publishing in London" ( though he doesn't get out much -  he has a curiously lurid view of 90's Soho) so perhaps we can forgive him and his serial killer heroine such strange ideas, as they set about murdering their way across the literary map of the UK.
Excellent plot though. We see the killings (stylishly realised) from the killer's point of view, learn and understand her motives. Then we meet the failing, bitter, and covetous Jack Jackson, looking to take revenge on his arrogant but successful brother, the writer David Jackson. Trouble is, when Jack finds him, he's already hanging from a ceiling, dressed in suspenders and lacy knickers - and seriously dead. An ingenious solution to his predicament occurs to him...
Unfortunately at around this point, Rees loses the momentum. To make the dazzling denouement of the final chapter work, he requires a dubious device or two that not only slow the pace but strain the credulity. But that final chapter is a classic. It is delicious with irony and provides a stunning
revelation and, I think, a final piece of literary legerdemain. And it's one that sends you back over the pages to test your theory.
One other thing. A quote from the Evening Standard on the front cover speaks of "gratuitous" sex and violence. My Concise Oxford defines gratuitous as "un-called for, motiveless". The sex and violence (not always separate) in this novel is absolutely necessary to the plot, an essential component. I look forward to the next from Mr. Rees - and not just for the sex!
Bob Cornwell

 Review
Dimitri and the Milk Drinkers by Michael Pearce
Collins Crime £14.99
Russia in the 1890s in the declining years of the Tzars.  It is a long way from Egypt in Edwardian times in the declining years of British rule, but Michael Pearce manages the transition without difficulty.  After ten novels featuring Captain Gareth Owen, the mamur zapt, Head of the Khedive's Secret Police,  Michael Pearce offers us a new creation in what is promised as the first of a new series.
Dimitri Kameron is a young lawyer of Russian-Scottish descent, a junior Examining Magistrate.  It is not a position as exalted as that of the mamur zapt, but Dimitri has some status, if lowly, and certainly not as lowly as the poor and oppressed who can have noticed little change in their lot after the Communists took over in 1927.  The Russia evoked by Michael Pearce in this enjoyable novel is a grim place where corruption is rife throughout the system.  If one is to survive one must fawn and lie and cheat.  Dimitri's superior tells him that the second rule of bureaucracy is "make sure that responsibility lies elsewhere".  Dimitri is fully aware of that.   He is a survivor and "bright" in the view of his superior.
He needs all his "brightness" to survive when he is given the unenviable task of finding Anna Semeonova, a beautiful and well-connected young woman who has mysteriously disappeared from the regional Court House in Kursk where Dimitri is based,   A further complication arises when it looks as if she may have been transported by mistake to Siberia in one of the prison wagons.
Dimitri's journey in search of Anna takes him several months and many hundreds of miles into Siberia.  Even when he reaches the camp where she is imprisoned his task is not over.  He is obstructed by minor officials at every turn and he begins to wonder whether there is a sinister cover-up. He is forced to mingle with the prisoners and to seek the help of the Molokans or Milk-Drinkers.  This is a conservative sect which sprang up in the seventeenth century and is noted for its adherence to the drinking of milk.   They are in Anna's words "good" people,  very special people who are against "all violence, whether it is the stupid, mindless violence of the criminals or the kind of violence that the Government uses all the time" Moreover they have "to bear  witness" and when Anna becomes one of them Dimitri seeks her help to expose a massacre of prisoners.
Dimitri and the Milk-Drinkers gives a convincing picture of life in Russia and of the oppressive Tzarist legal regime which Dimitri is forced to circumvent in order to survive.  It is also very funny.  A most promising precursor of a series.
JOHN BOYLES

  Review
Germanicus by David Wishart
Sceptre £16.99
I reckon Raymond Chandler would have been proud of David Wishart's hero Marcus Corvinus - though I doubt Chandler ever considered writing about the high and low life of ancient Rome.  Corvinus, like Marlow, has the same hardness of character tempered with a snappy humour, and the metaphors Wishart uses made me burst out laughing several times, to my wife's concern.
Corvinus is not alone: other characters are equally skilfully drawn, especially his aristocratic wife Rufia Perilla and his head slave Bathyllus, a kind of ancient Roman Jeeves. Then there are the local watchman, army officers and squaddies, and the unpleasant hangers-on around the governor of Antioch: one can only assume Mr Wishart has observed the diplomatic set closely for him to have created so believably nasty a group of people.
We are taken to ancient Rome at a time when the empire was tottering. Armies were mutinying, and fresh troops had to be found to restore order; the kings of vassal states were flexing their muscles, trying to regain a little independence from the imperial power; political groups were struggling to win control; corruption was rife. In politics, extreme measures were often resorted to, and even murder could be condoned if committed in the interest of the state.
Germanicus is a real pleasure to read. The action is well paced, the plot intriguingly convoluted with twists throughout, and the whole is enhanced by the fact that the story itself is based on a real historical event: the murder of the stepson of the Emperor Tiberius. Tacitus talks of it, mentioning the discovery of lead tablets as well as body parts and other similarly unpleasant indications of witchcraft, although poison is likely to have been the real instrument of death. Into this conspiratorial tale, Wishart injects Corvinus, who has been asked to investigate by the ageing - and terrifying - hag Livia, the Emperor's mother. Corvinus is well placed to look into the murder: he's known for his intelligence, and has a father and uncle who are both important enough in government to give him a degree of authority.
Wishart unfolds a fascinating story of global intrigues, showing how politicians manipulate chaotic situations for their own advantage. Personally I believe his wise-cracking investigator deserves much more exposure, and I look forward to many more books from him.
Michael Jecks

  Review
Confession by Nicholas Rhea
Constable Crime £16.99
For eleven years the police have been baffled by the murders of a serial killer who is known to them as the Sandal Strangler.  The victims had all been prostitutes.  They had been savagely raped and strangled and their footwear - invariably sandals - had been removed.  Furthermore every murder, eleven in all, had been committed very close to midsummer's day, 24th June.
The breakthrough for the police comes when a young man driving a bright red sports car races past the more leisurely Vauxhall of Detective Superintendent Mark Pemberton and misjudges a very sharp right bend.  The car crashes into an oak tree.  Pemberton and his companions, his lover Detective Constable Lorraine Cashmere and a priest, Father Flynn, manage to get the driver out of the wreck of his car.  He is dying, and he knows it and seeing the priest he confesses to the murder of a woman.  Pemberton overhears some of the confession, but the priest refuses to reveal all that the dying man said and claims that the "seal of confession (is) inviolable"
Pemberton feels obliged to look into the matter of the confession by the young man, James Bowmen Browning.  The most recent of the Sandal Strangler murders has just taken place on his patch and he wonders whether Browning is the murderer.  And so the investigation begins.  Nicholas Rhea, whose real name is Peter N Walker, was a serving police officer for thirty years and knows all about police procedures,  Inevitably the investigation is wholly convincing.  It involves a large number of officers, so many that one begins to lose track of who is who, but it all rings very true.  Mark Pemberton stays at the centre of the proceedings, analysing vital information as it comes in and issuing instructions to his team.  He refuses to believe that  Browning is the murderer and focuses attention on Browning's friend, Hugh Dawlish.   And it is Pemberton's careful and probing questioning of his prime suspect which pays dividends in the end.
Pemberton may not be as appealing a character as Nicholas Rhea's latest creation, Detective Inspector Montague Fluke, the superstitious detective who is an authority on water troughs, but he is solid and convincing and dominates this aptly titled novel.
John Boyles