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.

Hell Hath No Fury, by Ingrid Noll
(HarperCollins, £14.99)
The obsession that leads stalkers to kill is usually associated with men fixated on women. But what happens when a strait-laced spinster on the wrong side of middle age tumbles head over heels in love with a family man? In Ingrid Noll's gripping novel, respectable insurance clerk Rosemarie Hirte finds herself trapped in a downward spiral of lust and violence as dark passions swamp her normally cool head and plunge her into tragedy. At first, she's satisfied with calling his number just to hear his voice on the phone. But soon she has traced his home address and is hiding in his garden like a Peeping Tom, perfectly placed to see his argue with his wife and to step fatally between them. Murder having been once committed, Noll demonstrates the increasing callousness of a killer desensitised to normal human responses who starts to perceive killing as the answer to every problem. With convincing insight into a mind twisted and stunted by emotional deprivation, Noll has produced a cool thriller that reveals the chilling nature of obsessive love and the survival instinct. A first-rate example of the Eurocrime novel that focuses on the internal lives of its characters rather than fast-paced action.

Honky Tonk Kat, by Karen Kijewski
(Headline, £16.99)
Karen Kijewski, on the other hand, is one of the better exponents of the soft-boiled private eye novels that have swamped America in recent years. With Honky Tonk Kat, she takes her female private eye Kat Colorado away from her usual Californian beat to Nashville, where she probes behind the scenes of the country music business. Kat is summoned by Dakota Jones, a childhood friend, now a 'new country' star, who is receiving threatening letters. No sooner has Kat stepped off the plane than someone throws a stun grenade at Dakota's next concert, triggering major panic. Then another singer who looks a lot like Dakota is gunned down. Kat searches for a killer among the double-dealing leeches who all want a piece of Dakota, and in the process, helps her friend to a better understanding of herself. I hear, courtesy of the Internet, that Kijewski spent a week on the road in the tour bus of a top country music act, which accounts for the authentic ambience of this novel. A credible human dimension is often sadly lacking in the US PI genre, but Kijewski never lets her readers down in that area. Kat and her companions feel like the real thing, with all the recognisable flaws and foibles that make her sizeable following keep buying the books. Can't say I blame them.

The Rosewood Casket, by Sharyn McCrumb
(Hodder & Stoughton, £16.99)
America's national obsessions seem often to follow the same arc as those of the individual. A young country, for years it was the demanding brat that took everything to its bosom that it could get its hands on. Then there were the playground battles of the Civil War, and the dawning awareness of the big world outside and its relation to the US. Now as it approaches middle age, America is old enough to have a history of its own and has grown introspective. It's a trend reflected in American fiction, and it is currently responsible for some of the most interesting and creative crime novels. It started with Tony Hillerman's fine Navajo series, and now Sharyn McCrumb has emerged as the Queen of Appalachia, blending history with mystery in a beguiling mixture. This is the fourth in her so-called 'ballad' novels set in the small mountain communities of Kentucky and Tenessee and it shows a writer increasing in stature with every book. The theme of The Rosewood Casket is land and man's relationship to it. Hill farmer Randall Stargill is dying and his family foregathers to build him the coffin that is his last request. But the vultures are also gathering in the form of greedy land developers. Sheriff Spencer Arrowood is dragged in reluctantly when the local 'wise woman' turns up with a smaller casket of a child's bones, demanding they be buried alongside Stargill. The dramatic and poignant resolution has the air of a sad inevitability about it, yet McCrumb finds hope in the harshest of circumstances. The lesson of history, she seems to say, is that human beings find a way to survive that affords them some kind of dignity. An absorbing tale.

The Curious Eat Themselves, by John Straley
(Gollancz, £15.99)
At the diagonally opposite corner of America, in the snowy wastes of Alaska, John Straley is also examining the culture and history of a distinctive tract of his native land. Like McCrumb, he turns his back on the urban nightmares that feature in most American crime novels and movies and concentrates on what the dying years of the twentieth century are doing to the land and the people of this remote territory. The answer isn't pretty. Commerce and greed have destroyed not only the traditional way of life of the Tlingit people, but also the environment and the animals. To say this is a private eye novel about the search for the brutal killer of an environmentalist who had previously been raped while working undercover at a mining plant is to reveal almost nothing about Straley's extraordinary imagination. Haunting and mesmerising, Straley writes with the same understanding of the landscape as McCrumb, but he consistently avoids her occasional lapse into sentimentality. His is a world that is strange and harsh, but lit with shafts of humane forgiveness, unpredictable points of honour and an honesty that is often painful and occasionally very, very funny. Strange, poetic and unlike anything else you'll read this year.

A Jury Of Her Peers, by Jean Hanff Korelitz
(Macmillan, £15.99)
Scott Turow, John Grisham and Richard North Patterson are jointly responsible not only for the felling of acres of timber but also for a whole new industry -- the American legal thriller. The rise of the courtroom drama has reached unprecedented levels, providing lawyers with even richer pickings than practising law, and making British fans more familiar with the idiosyncrasies of the US legal system than we are with our own. Following the O.J.Simpson trial, a new obsession has captivated these writers. Now more than ever, it's the system itself that's on trial, the right-wing forces of law and order threatening the very notion of legal process. In A Jury Of Her Peers, by Jean Hanff Korelitz too many guilty people are walking free, too many prosecutors are being humiliated instead of having their political ambitions underpinned. When Sybylla Muldoon's client is found dead during the opening phases of his trial, it's the final confirmation she needs that there really is something very strange about a case everyone else is falling over backwards to convince her is open and shut. Driven by insatiable curiosity, Sybylla follows her instincts and unravels a horrifying conspiracy to undermine jury trial itself, a conspiracy to develop novel jury nobbling techniques that owe more to pharmacology than good old bribery, corruption and threat. It gives a whole new meaning to 'conviction'. Persuasive and chilling, well written and atmospheric, A Jury Of Her Peers explores what happens when the highest in the land take the law into their own hands. And it's not a pretty sight.

Felony Murder, by Joseph T.Klempner
(Hodder & Stoughton, £16.99)
Defence attorney Dean Abernathy enjoys his work. He likes to take on the system and beat it, but he even he knows when he's beaten. Two witnesses saw his client, a homeless drug user, threaten New York's popular police commissioner with a knife then, when he collapsed with a heart attack, callously rob him. Under US law, that's called felony murder. But Joey Spadafino is adamant that he's been fitted up by the cops. And because Abernathy doesn't have anything better to do with his evenings and weekends, he starts looking into Spadafino's claims. Gradually, he starts to find anomalies that gradually lead him deeper into a labyrinth of intrigue that threatens more lives than his own. Perverting the course of justice is the least of the crimes he uncovers in his exploration of what happens when men with good motives use criminal means to achieve their ends. Strong on suspense and drama, Klempner provides the reader with an insight into the twilight zone of the accused who awaits trial and the defender who seeks to exonerate him. If they don't make a movie of this, I'll eat the dust jacket.

Oxford Fall, by Veronica Stallwood
(Macmillan, £15.99)
When crime writers collide with Oxford colleges, there's often a sense of psychic forelocks being tugged. Not so with Veronica Stallwood, no respecter of persons, no matter how many letters they can assemble after their names -- especially when those letters spell out anonymous threatening letters to her heroine, romantic novelists Kate Ivory. The verbal warnings and physical attacks begin after Kate's penniless state coincides with a temporary vacancy at Bartlemas College following their development officer's unfortunately fatal trip from the top of the college's landmark tower. It soon becomes clear to Kate that someone is very keen for her not to take up the job and it's not long before she realises that same someone has already killed at least once. Kate's investigations into foxy fellows, scheming scholars and lying librarians is parallelled by angelic analysis of the victim's hand in his own fate thanks to a clever authorial device that could have been twee but manages to be amusing instead. An entertaining and often acerbic insight into the world of scheming spires.

Lestrade and the Devil's Own, by M.J.Trow
(Constable, £15.99)
In Dr Watson's chronicles of Sherlock Holmes' cases, Inspector Sholto Lestrade was the constant butt of sorrowful head-shaking about the pitiful state of the intelligence of Scotland Yard officers. But in M.J. Trow's series of novels that liberate Lestrade from Holmes' shadow, we see a different picture. Lestrade may appear to swing between old buffer and buffoon, but he still manages to unravel mysteries whose complexities would have had Holmes reaching for the cocaine syringe and the violin. As before, Trow fixes on real historical events and casts a fresh, sometimes lunatic eye on them. This time, Suffragette Emily Davidson's fatal plunge beneath the King's Horse at the Derby, and the rumours of insider trading that attached to Lloyd George and Home Secretary Rufus Isaacs are the targets of his terrible puns and wonderful plotting. As Lestrade himself is framed for murder and awaits the hangman, it's left to his sidekicks to shed light on a bizarre conspiracy that involves the early days of motor racing, a lethal croquet match, an amorous publican, a publisher with a double life and murderous machinations in the highest of places. I groaned, I giggled, I gave it full marks for fun and games.

Heart Trouble, by Kathy Hogan Trocheck
(Headline, £16.99)
When it came to cashing in as a private eye after she quit the police force, Callahan Garrity was a failure. She was so bad at making a living by cleaning up cases that she had to set up House Mouse, an agency dedicated to cleaning up houses instead. But in spite of her efforts to avoid clients with problems more serious than ring around the bath, murder seems to cling to Callahan like mould to grouting. This time, her client is Atlanta's Most Hated Female. A drunk driver who mowed down a little girl and got off with community service, Whitney Dobbs is on everybody's hit list. But in Callahan's book, even a hit-and-run driver deserves justice, and when Wh itney's husband tries to cheat her out of her rightful divorce settlement, she's prepared to uncover his hidden assets. Then Whitney is gunned down. Faced with a city full of suspects, it takes all Callahan's resources just to stay alive. Aided and abetted by colourful cohorts like a recuperating mother who thinks convalescence means taking the odd nap between crime-busting, a bunch of eccentric cleaning crews who don't mind the odd dust-up with the bad guys, and a pair of gay emus, Callahan chases down her villains with gusto and grim humour. Heart Trouble is a fast page-turner than builds to a genuinely thrilling climax. A welcome antidote to all the sport we'll be getting from Atlanta any minute now!

Juicy Lucy, by Valerie Kershaw
(Constable, £15.99)
Like Callahan Garrity, Mitch Mitchell can't manage to make her partnership in a private investigation agency pay all the bills, though Mitch's alternative employment as a radio presenter involves digging the dirt rather than cleaning it up. But she still has to deal with messy spills as her journalism overflows into her detective work. A routine radio feature on care in the community takes on sinister overtones when Mitch comes face to face with a murder victim who's in no state to provide a sound bite. Her inquiries on another case bring her into further contact with the psychotherapy group where the murder victim had been a member, and Mitch suddenly discovers a conflict of loyalties as she struggles towards a solution that brings her face to face with her own mortality. In spite of her irrepressible sense of humour, Valerie Kershaw paints a sensitive and believable portrait of damaged people whose fragile grip on their lives is under constant threat from the everyday events most of us take for granted. In this scary, funny and deeply humane book she never shies away from the difficult issues raised by care in the community and society's prejudices against those it perceives as mad, bad or merely dangerous to know.

Black Light, by Stephen Hunter
(Century, £15.99)
Bob Lee Swagger understands death. He's delivered it enough; he was the US Marines' top sniper in the jungles of Vietnam and it's earned his keep since then. But he's put death behind him for a simple life raising horses and enjoying the unexpected gift of wife and child. Then callow journalist Russ Pewtie arrives looking for a story. It's not the story Bob expects. Russ isn't interested in Bob's heroism. What he wants to write about is the terrible day in 1955 when Bob's state trooper father was gunned down in the line of duty. Curiosity spurs Bob into examining the few pathetic leftovers of his father's life, then a single incongruity brands an incredible truth into his brain. Tracking a forty year old trail through small-town Arkansas leads Bob and Russ to the roots of a conspiracy that winds forward to a present where men will still do anything to keep the past hidden. Cleverly crafted, packed with technology, technique and trauma, Black Light is raw excitement on the page. A tragic story of fathers and sons, it reveals the dark truths of the heroic heart but never forgets that humour often casts the blackest light of all.

Misbegotten, by James Gabriel Berman
(Fourth Estate, £8.99)
There is no greater obsession than the creation of life. Women aim themselves like heat-seeking missiles at conception when their biological clock starts ticking louder than a time-bomb; divorced fathers kidnap their own children because they know they own them; adopted children spend every penny they've earned to uncover the truth of their origins. What happens when obsessions collide is the stuff of James Gabriel Berman's second novel. Bill Crapshoot is a professional criminal, a psychopathic perfectionist who has turned car theft coupled with brutal murder into an art form. Caitlin Bourke is the suburban wife of a rich man who can breed money but not children. When she decides artificial insemination is the answer, their lives meet head-on with hideous consequences. The internal narratives of the central protagonists form the core of this chilling and spare novel and Berman conveys their inner lives with the cool skill of a psychic ventriloquist. Cold blooded killer and hot blooded romantic clash, producing a chilling climax that makes The Omen films feel like Watch With Mother.

Easy Meat, by John Harvey
(Heinemann, £15.99)
A teenage boy hangs himself in local authority custody; another sells his services to married men in park shrubberies for £15; right-wing thugs turn to queer-bashing once the football is over; and frightened men are brutally raped and robbed of their sense of themselves. Against the odds, in the midst of these tragedies, somehow Detective Inspector Charlie Resnick manages to fall in love. These are the building bricks in John Harvey's latest Nottingham novel, and they reveal almost nothing of the rich and varied texture of a finely constructed work that has all the tragic inevitability of Shakespeare and the compassionate humanity of Ella Fitzgerald's voice. Thronged with characters drawn in a few lines into people we recognise, Easy Meat is enthralling; I read it in a day and it stayed with me for many more, surfacing as I fell asleep, echoing in the corners of my mind as I drove the motorway at midnight. At its best, the crime novel illuminates the society we live in, showing us the often painful truths that lie just outside our peripheral vision. When he is on form, no-one does the British police procedural better than John Harvey. In Easy Meat, he has hit a peak seldom achieved by any writer, inside the genre or out. If this doesn't win awards, there is no justice.

The Monster of Florence, by Magdelen Nabb
(HarperCollins, £15.99)
Florence inevitably seems a more exotic location than Nottingham for the police procedural novel, but there's a surprising similarity between the depravity lurking close to the surface. This is Nabb's tenth excursion into the criminal world of Northern Italy seen through the eyes of the irredeemably southern cop, Marshal Guarnaccia, and this time, she examines a series of unsolved high profile slayings that have baffled the Italian police for years. Seven courting couples have been ritually slaughtered, and now a politically ambitious prosecutor is determined to find someone to put on trial. Anyone, really, as long as they look the part. The Monster of Florence blends fact and fiction into a narrative so seamless it's hard not to believe Nabb has uncovered the truth that has eluded the Italian police, not least because we never question Marshal Guarnaccia's humanity. She writes about Italy with an insider's eye, revealing a contemporary Florence every bit as bloody, dangerous and devious as the court of the Medicis. Her books are like Italian cuisine -- the best ingredients combine to produce a rich mystery, satisfying and worth savouring, with sudden surprising flavours that ambush and astonish the senses. This is a haunting thriller where past and present collide, where ambition brutalises those who have most need of compassion and where lies are often more credible than truth.