Don’t trust me... I’m a doctor
THE HOLLOW MEN by Rob McCarthy (Mulholland £14.99)
THIS ferocious debut from a young medical student is one of the finest first crime novels I have encountered this year.
Its protagonist, police surgeon Dr Harry Kent, who works in the intensive care unit of a London hospital and depends on amphetamines to get him through, is a character of whom we are going to hear a great deal — TV rights have already been optioned. It’s Holby City meets Happy Valley.
A medic who served in Afghanistan, Kent is pitched into a police hostage incident in a fast food shop, which ends when armed police shoot the disturbed teenage hostage-taker he has been sent in to examine — a young black boy named Solomon Idris.
The scene shifts to the ICU, where Kent again saves Idris when he has a devastating allergic reaction to some of the drugs that have been wrongly administered to him. Kent realises that somewhere in the medical fraternity lurks a killer.
Written with admirable verve and lacerating detail, it announces the arrival of a shiny new talent in British crime writing and grips from the start.
SIX FOUR by Hideo Yokoyama (Quercus £16.99)
AT 635 pages, this battleship of a crime novel comes with a big reputation, having sold more than 1.3 million copies in its native Japan.
It is Yokoyama’s sixth novel, but his first to be published in English. A former investigative reporter, he gave up journalism to write fiction.
The story focuses on detective Yoshinobu Mikami, a man with an unhappy past who is appointed press director of a police district in 2002, only for a kidnapping and murder from almost 14 years earlier to come back to haunt him.
In that original case, a sevenyear-old Tokyo schoolgirl was abducted and her parents were forced to listen to the kidnapper’s ruthless demands for five heart-breaking days.
They never learnt his identity, nor did they recover their daughter alive and the case remained unsolved, becoming known simply as ‘Six Four’.
Now, with one year left before the statute of limitations runs out on the case, which will mean the kidnapper can never be prosecuted even if he is found, Mikami uncovers an anomaly in the investigation, and it becomes live again.
Slow in pace, but epic in ambition, it unfurls like a flower in the spring sunlight, steadily increasing its grip as it does so.
A SIEGE OF BITTERNS by Steve Burrows (Point Blank £7.99)
KEEN birdwatcher Burrows uses his passion to illuminate this bewitching, eccentric story of Canadianborn Domenic Jejeune.
Jejeune is a police inspector in Saltmarsh in the heart of birdwatching East Anglia, where he would rather watch birds than solve crime.
He does not have that luxury, however, the moment a prominent local ecological activist is found hanging from a tree.
Jejeune’s first theory is that the man has been killed over local rivalry among twitchers about who has seen the most species. A second murder follows, once again with a bird-watching element, and tensions rise still further.
This is one of the most delightful, old- fashioned mysteries of recent years — even if you know nothing about birds, and do not possess an anorak or a pair of binoculars.