Books Reviewed by Val McDermid Winner of this year's Golden Dagger Award All reviews originally appear in the Manchester Evening News and are kindly supplied by the author. Photo of Val by Jerry Bauer.

Quite Ugly One Morning, by Christopher Brookmyre
(Little, Brown, £12.99)
Suddenly Edinburgh's nearly as cool as Manchester. With writers like Irvine Welsh and Alan Warner carving out a niche in mainstream fiction, it could only be a matter of time before someone did the same dirty realist trick in the crime genre. With his debut novel, Christopher Brookmyre sets out to do just that.
On the run from unnamed terrors in Los Angeles, journalist Jack Parlabane is back in town. But before he's even got his feet under the newsdesk, he's tramping through somebody else's vital bodily fluids and straight into trouble. The dead man's a high flying doctor who's had his wings seriously clipped and, intrigued by the incongruities of the murder scene, Parlabane starts nosing around with the help of the victim's ex-wife. Soon, they're discovering the kind of dirt about NHS finances that brings a whole new meaning to the word reforms.
Streetwise and smart, this is a confident debut that crams a lot of high-class story-telling into its pages, with everything from a hit man like the Terminator to computer hacking thrown into the plot. Brookmyre's writing is fast, funny and furious, filled with imaginative flourishes that had me smiling with appreciation as much as humour. One to watch, he could become the Terry Pratchett of the mystery genre.

A Timely Death, by Janet Neel
(Constable, £15.99)
Domestic violence, fraud, murder, adultery and drugs set the agenda for Janet Neels' latest outing for Detective Chief Superintendent John McLeish and his senior civil servant wife Francesca Wilson. A businessman is found hanging from his kitchen ceiling dressed in women's underwear. But this is no accident -- the table he'd been standing on was far too heavy for him to have kicked it clear by chance. And since his death very conveniently averts different sorts of disaster for all his nearest and dearest,nobody's going to believe the killer's attempts to make it look like a burglary gone wrong.
Five suspects emerge, each with motives connected to money, sex or past abuse. In a clever unravelling of a complex mystery, both McLeish and Francesca find their own marriage under threat. Will they remain loyal, or will they too opt for betrayal?
Herself a merchant banker and former DTI official, Janet Neel writes with an insider's eye and translates complicated and arcane processes into accessible and suspenseful plots. She's not afraid to take risks with established series characters, hoping our affection will transcend their transgressions. Subtle, credible and compelling.

Off Side, by Manuel Vazquez Montalban
(Serpent's Tail, £8.99)
Just when you thought the football season was over, the European Championships begin. And to celebrate the beautiful game, Serpent's Tail have translated this fascinating Euro-novel featuring deadly deeds in the world of Spanish soccer. When Barcelona -- Catalonia's Man Utd -- sign ace English striker Jack Mortimer, they expect glorious things. What they get are a series of strangely poetic anonymous threats promising the centre forward will be murdered at dusk. But Barcelona -- like Man Utd -- isn't the only club in town. Struggling Centellas -- draw your own parallels, I like my face the shape it is -- have also signed a new striker. And Alberto Palacin is a man with something to prove. As gourmet private eye Pepe Carvalho explores the alien realm of football, he soon discovers that it's not so foreign after all. The same ambition, greed and duplicity occur in the dressing room and the boardroom, and when those two worlds collide, it's a certain recipe for disaster. Unpicking the motivations and finding answers behind a pair of murders connected in the least likely way stretches Carvalho's philosophical calm to the limits before he finds some kind of resolution. Montalban, Spain's leading crime writer, is Barcelona's answer to Umberto Eco. Like Eric Cantona, he's a bit of a philosopher. And like the French striker, he's scored some spectacular successes with his discursive, elliptical novels. With his atmospheric evocation of the spirit and characters of Barcelona, he's found another winner.

Flashback, by Jim Lusby
(Gollancz, £15.99)
In his second novel to feature Irish cop Carl McCadden, Jim Lusby continues to reveal the real Ireland behind the Ballykissangel whimsy. It's a world of strange sexual games, cross-dressing stand-up comediennes and amateur actors who have trouble distinguishing playacting from reality. The world of joky tea-towels and Riverdance is well offstage in this taut and troubling tale of an old friendship that spills into the present in the form of the naked and bloody corpses of two women so badly battered and flayed that they're unrecognisable. With pressure from the politicians and the press, McCadden finds his imagination stretched to its limits and beyond to comprehend the mind of a killer before he strikes again. Dark and deadly, raw and realistic, Flashback delivers what Lusby's first, Making The Cut so refreshingly promised.

Death and Restoration, by Iain Pears
(HarperCollins, £14.99)
You don't have to know much about art to enjoy Iain Pears' Italian mysteries. Like everybody's favourite teacher, he shares his passion unobtrusively, imparts his knowledge with subtlety, and flavours his lessons with wit. Death and Restoration is the sixth outing for Flavia di Stefano of Rome's Art Squad and her English sidekick, art dealer turned lecturer Jonathan Argyll. Flavia, left temporarily in charge to prove herself, has plenty to worry about. A major player on the international art theft scene is in town, and a big restoration project up for grabs is provoking more unscrupulous behaviour than usual. Then the Art Squad is warned a raid is about to take place on a monastery in the city. Everyone thinks it's a hoax since the monks only own one painting worth stealing, and even that is probably a forgery. Then the burglary actually happens, leaving the Father Superior bleeding on the chapel floor and the wrong painting missing. Icons and hitmen, tycoons and cleaners all have their part to play before this diverting and satisfyingly complicated story works itself out. Thirty pages from the end, I was convinced I knew exactly what was going to happen. I was wrong. That's not something that happens often.

God Bless John Wayne, by Kinky Friedman
(Faber & Faber, £8.99)
Writers are often asked if their fictional characters resemble them in any way. Well, Kinky Friedman, a former country singer who owns a cat, smokes fat cigars and is a friend of Bob Dylan, has invented a semi-amateur sleuth called Kinky Friedman, a former country singer who owns a cat, smokes fat cigars... etc. I guess people don't often ask him the question. With his own inimitable style, the Kinkster returns to action to uncover the secrets lurking deep in the past of Ratso, one of the Village Irregulars who generally find their lives enriched by helping the king of the one-liners with his investigations. His reluctant search for Ratso's real mother provides the man who gave a whole new meaning to the expression, 'shoots from the lip,' with plenty of opportunities for the gags and name dropping that have been his constant trademark since he first burst on the mystery scene like a balloon filled with water. I've always enjoyed Friedman's off-the-wall approach to the private eye novel, laughing out loud on more occasions than is probably respectable in public places. God Bless John Wayne certainly delivers on those former promises. My only caveat is that this is not a book to be swallowed whole. Rather it should be dipped into in gentle doses over a few days. That way, you probably won't notice the way he repeats some of those smart one-liners...

A Dying Light in Corduba, by Lindsey Davis
(Century, £15.99)
My mum always used to say if you waited long enough, anything would come back into fashion. The latest adventure of Marcus Didius Falco, the world's private eye, proves the point. If you thought designer olive oils with a price tag like a bottle of vintage wine were a produce of the foodie industry of the Nineties, forget it. Back in Ancient Rome, the estate bottled -- or should that be amphora-ed? -- high grade salad dressing was apparently worth a killing. With a fellow investigator murdered and the chief spy left for dead with a savage head injury, not to mention a girlfriend on the point of giving birth to his first child,any sensible man would leave the case well alone. But as Davis's legion of fans knows only too well, sensible has never been Falco's option of choice. Of course he sets sail for the olive groves in Spain with a highly pregnant Helena Justina in attendance. And of course, it all goes olive-shaped. As ever, Davis's Roman Empire is as vivid as downtown Salford, its intrigues and politics sharply relevant to our contemporary world. A Dying Light in Corduba is perhaps the darkest of her Falco novels so far, yet the overall effect is strangely uplifting. Salted with humour, spiced with unsentimental affection, Davis's writing is a model of what the history mystery should be.

Death's Autograph, by Marianne Macdonald
(Hodder & Stoughton, £16.99)
Dido Hoare is doing all right. She's survived a painful divorce, her business as an antiquarian bookseller is keeping its head above water, her father seems to be recovering from the heart attack that nearly killed him. Then in the dark of a late night country lane, somebody tries to force her car off the road. Within days her father gets a threatening letter, her shop is burgled and her ex-husband spectacularly murdered. And she doesn't have the faintest idea why. Dido reluctantly realises the only way to recover her former quiet life is to throw herself into the search to uncover what's behind these mysterious attacks and who's pulling the strings. Along the way, the reader gains a fascinating insight into the world of book dealing. In this first novel, Marianne Macdonald has created an engaging heroine with an original voice. The pace slows a little towards the middle of the book, but builds up to a satisfying series of doubles crosses on the way to an entertaining finale. If this is the first in a series, Macdonald has set herself some interesting hurdles to overcome in the next!

Publishers seem to be celebrating the forthcoming Gay Pride Week with a splurge of gay and lesbian crime fiction that reflects the whole spectrum of the mystery genre.
Wavewalker, by Stella Duffy
(Serpent's Tail, £8.99)
Wavewalker is the second outing for dyke detective Saz Martin, a sharp, sexy, smart-mouthed PI. Saz is mysteriously hired by an anonymous client to investigate a therapy guru whose teachings are about to be incorporated into mainstream NHS medicine. As she starts to probe behind the surface in a journey that takes her from her native London to San Francisco, from the nasty '90s to the screwed-up '70s, Saz discovers that behind every surface there is a distorting mirror that begins to threaten her own sense of herself. Often second novels are a disappointment; but with Wavewalker, Duffy has moved up a gear, demonstrating a maturity of style and command of structure that many aspire to and few achieve. Clever, cunning and careful to avoid the obvious, Wavewalker is a real treat.

A Small Sacrifice, by Ellen Hart
(The Women's Press, £6.99)
Ellen Hart's sleuth Jane Lawless bucks the trend of the feisty feminist PI that seems to have obssessed American crime fiction for the past ten years, preferring instead to operate within what purists think of as the English traditional mystery -- an amateur detective who finds herself reluctantly sucked into solving crimes involving her friends and relations whose solutions lie beyond the capabilities of the police. Where Hart strikes a different chord is in making her 'tec a lesbian. And interestingly, it makes not a shred of difference to the way the story is worked out. Accompanied as usual by her witty side-kick, theatre director Cordelia Thorn, restaurant owner Lawless is plunged into a mystery death following an emotionally charged reunion between a bunch of college friends. Complicated plotting keeps the reader guessing, though I found it hard to like anyone other than the endearing Cordelia. Perfect for a rainy weekend with a box of chocolates!

Blood Waters, by Chaz Brenchley
(Flambard Press, £7.99)
Chaz Brenchley straddles the borderline between horror and psychological crime thrillers, and his latest collection of short stories features a collectionof chilling cameos to make the average reader reluctant to turn out the light. In deceptively nonchalant prose, he reveals twisted lives lurking beneath civilised surfaces, stripping bare the desperate, driven demons that possess those who seem least likely to offend against civilisation. Brenchley is a master story teller who has the uncanny and uncomfortable ability to get under the skin of his subjects, whether they be murderers or mothers, pimps or policemen. Writing about the underbelly of society, he reveals a talent for gripping the reader by the throat and refusing to let go. An anthology to open minds.

The Two-Bear Mambo, by Joe R.Lansdale
(Victor Gollancz, £8.99)
East Texas's oddest couple are back. And this time, it's more than personal. It's bleak, bitter and bitingly, corrosively funny. Hap Collins and Leonard Pine, white and black, straight and gay, have only their friendship as a bulwark against the routine bigotry of their world. But it's a powerful and shaming weapon, rooted in honour and love. And when Hap's ex-lover, Leonard's fearless lawyer Florida Grange, goes missing in a stronghold of a bunch of racists who make the Klu Klux Klan look like the Commission for Racial Equality, the boys know they only have one option. They have to face down the dragon and find Florida. They find a community where Florida's investigations into the death in custody of a black man have already stirred up the kind of stuff best left at the bottom of the septic tank, a place where civil rights only apply to the right sort of whites and where even the law has learned to turn a blind eye for a quiet life. Hap and Leonard's violent struggle to uncover the dirty truth behind Florida's disappearance pushes them right to the edge of their sense of themselves, threatening all the things about themselves that make their lives worth living, battering their bodies and their spirits. Heartbreaking, heartstopping yet heartening, this wonderfully told tale is not for the fainthearted.
See Feature on Joe R. Lansdale's Much Mojo & The Two-Bear Mambo

Running From The Law, by Lisa Scottoline
(HarperCollins, £14.99)
For tough-talking Philadelphia trial lawyer Rita Morrone, life is like poker. It's a gamble, it's a game, but most of all, it's deadly serious. And when a thorny sexual harrassment case turns into the country's most high-profile murder since O.J., the stakes are higher than they've ever been. The man she's defending is a distinguished judge who also happens to be the father of her long-term lover. So when the civil case turns criminal, she wants out. But her father has bred into her bones the inability to let people down, so Rita has to play it out to the death. And it means death, both literally and metaphorically. With her personal life in tatters, Rita has to recruit help from the most bizarre quarters to rescue the people she cares about. And when the stakes are high and the chips are down, nobody keeps their cool like Rita. Running From The Law is a pacy page-turner that kept me awake long past my bed-time. Fast, unpredictable and tense, it's a cleverly plotted entertainment that makes some serious points under the thrills. Crammed with wonderful one-liners -- "I may sleep with lawyers, but I'm not totally crazy" -- it's one to relish.

A Personal History of Thirst, by John Burdett
(Hodder & Stoughton, £16.99)
Every now and again, a book comes along that is almost impossible to review without revealing more than it's fair to let the potential reader know. John Burdett's first novel is a prime example. It holds up a dazzling series of distorted mirrors and every time I thought I'd grasped what was really going on, I realised I'd been outsmarted again. A Personal History Of Thirst uses the complex relationship between three people -- London criminal Oliver Thirst, barrister James Knight and the will o' the wisp American Daisy who appears to be the object of obssession for both men. But even that eternal triangle has more corners than seems mathematically possible. Using the hypocrisies of the law to reflect the society whose terms trap his characters, Burdett has produced a clever, rivetting legal thriller that is exotic and erotic, corruscating and corrupt. Written with an elegant and elliptical sophistication, this is a remarkably mature first novel. However, it's some years since Burdett practised law in the UK, and he's out of touch both with police culture and what is legally possible these days. But that's the only significant flaw in this first outing. Buy it and unravel its secrets.

Acqua Alta, by Donna Leon
(Macmillan, £15.99)
It's not her plotting that makes Donna Leon's Venetian novels such a riveting read. It's the ambience of the world's most seedily beautiful city that sucks the reader in like the pull of the tide in the lagoon; and it's the rich tapestry of characters and human relationships that holds you as tightly as the gondolas moored on the Grand Canal. This is the fifth of her novels to feature the subtle and uncompromising Italian cop Commissario Guido Brunetti, and it reintroduces the diva Flavia Petrelli and her American lesbian lover Brett Lynch, central characters of the first, Death at La Fenice (That's the only giveaway that Leon's an American -- no Brit could seriously call a rich and cultured academic Brett Lynch...) When Brett is brutally attacked in their palazzo apartment, it's clear to Brunetti it has something to do with her work as an archaeologist. Brunetti's investigations reveal a racket in fake antiquities that threatens to rock the museum world from Paris to Peking, and behind it a viciously amoral collector who doesn't care how much ugliness is left in the wake of his headlong race to fill his life with beauty. In the fine tradition of her earlier novels, Acqua Alta is as rich, dark and satisfying as the Venetian speciality of squid slowly simmered in its own ink.

Bloodhounds, by Peter Lovesey
(Little,Brown, £15.99)
Peter Lovesey, winner of last year's Silver Dagger as runner-up to the best crime novel of the year for The Summons, has pressed his rotund Bath detective Peter Diamond back into active service in this well-crafted tribute to the 1930s Golden Age crime novel of puzzles, red herrings and locked room mysteries. A group of crime fiction buffs meet in a church crypt to discuss their passion (including a welcome plug for my own books!). They think they know all there is to know about murder, mayhem and mystery, but when a daring theft accompanied by cryptic riddles seems to point the finger at one of their number, they're at a loss for once. When seemingly inexplicable murder follows, the Bloodhounds are forced to turn to an equally puzzled Diamond to save them from more of the same. As ever, Lovesey writes with the light touch of a craftsman who really knows what he's doing, breathing life into the tired form of the puzzle novel with a genuinely clever plot. But in spite of his best efforts, he's been caught in the trap of his predecessors. When the puzzle element becomes the focus of the crime novel, characterisation has always suffered, and even in the hands of a master like Lovesey, this remains a weakness. Nevertheless much more than a historical curiosity, this will prove a highly satisfying read for the aficionados of the traditional English mystery.