Historical crime
fiction, Sherlock Holmes apart, is a little-explored niche
but Andrew Taylor demonstrates in The Anatomy of
Ghosts (Michael Joseph, $40, pbk) what a refreshing area
it is.
Not that Taylor's hero is a London toff like Holmes; rather
he is an 18th-century bookseller, John Holdsworth, down on
his luck, whose infant son drowns in an accident.
His wife falls into the hands of a charlatan who convinces
her she can talk to the dead boy's ghost - for a fee, of
course.
Disgusted, Holdsworth writes his own work denouncing ghosts
and becomes regarded as an authority, soon called upon to
solve the problem of a ghost at a Cambridge University
college.
To the pragmatic Holdsworth, a putative ghost must mean a
violent death and an unlikely sleuth is born.
Well researched and entertainingly written, the novel blends
history, murder and romance in a riveting blend.
- Geoffrey Vine
In From the Dead by
Mark Billingham (Little, Brown, $38.99, pbk) just before
Donna Langford comes out of prison after serving 10 years for
arranging the murder of her husband, Alan, she receives an
anonymous letter with a current photograph of the man she
thought had died in a car fire.
Then DI Tom Thorne is approached by a fledging private eye,
Anna Carpenter, who has been retained by Donna to find out
whether Alan is still alive and if he has their daughter, now
in her teens.
Thorne's life is a mess: he is on the verge of breaking up
with his girlfriend, Louise, whom he planned to marry, and a
major trial has just ended with the man accused of murder
being found not guilty.
Being told to babysit Anna to find out what really happened
to Langford is just another pain, pain that increases as the
book rattles along.
Lifted from the ho-hum by the fast pace and an unexpected
twist at the end, Billingham can chalk up another success for
his detective inspector.
- Gillian Vine
Australian crime
writer Angela Savage has set her second novel The
Half-Child (Text Publishing, $36, pbk) in Thailand, and
uses knowledge of that country to good effect.
Private eye Jayne Keeney is investigating the suicide of a
young Australian girl, Maryanne, who had been volunteering at
an orphanage when she supposedly took her own life.
She decides the best way to find out what happened is to work
at the same institution.
Jayne is an outgoing Australian girl who speaks fluent Thai,
giving her a distinct advantage in her undercover role.
Some highly illegal practices are soon discovered in this
supposedly Christian establishment.
Although some of the young children are up for adoption, many
born to single girls are being illegally adopted without the
mothers' knowledge.
This puts Jayne in grave danger as she tries desperately to
help out one solo mother to keep her child, while trying to
unravel the mystery of Maryanne's life before her death.
The story is set in some of the less salubrious parts of
Thailand and the miserable lives of the numerous bar girls
and dancers is convincingly described.
The outcome of the investigations is rather unexpected but
makes for an interesting story, an unusual plot and location.
- Helen Adams
Val McDermid's Trick of
the Dark (Little, Brown, pbk, $38.99) uses a serial
murder plot so convoluted she has to invent a huge
coincidence to resolve it, trivialising its intricacy.
The novel is a trifle heavy on life inside an Oxford college
and extremely heavy on the passions of a lesbian love tangle.
McDermid rightly protests the homophobia still rampant in our
communities but the stuff of murder mysteries it isn't.
- Geoffrey Vine
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