CRIME GEOFFREY WANSELL
BREATHE by Dominick Donald (Hodder £17.99, 528pp)
it iS December 1952 and London is in the grip of a suffocating smog that’s obliterating everything — the red double- decker buses, the street signs, even the policemen directing traffic. But in notting hill, a killer is lurking in the murky gloom, ready to strike.
Probationary PC richard Bourton, at 28 a veteran of the Korean War and therefore older than many of his police contemporaries, is just beginning his training when he discovers a man almost beaten to death.
eager to prove himself, Bourton begins to see connections between deaths in the area over the past 12 years since the Blitz.
this subtly woven mixture of fiction and fact, which partly draws on the notorious case of 10 rillington Place and the serial killer reg Christie, casts a magical spell, and even includes a moving love story. it is a stunning debut from a former academic, security expert and journalist. You can smell the fog and feel the breath being sucked out of your body as you struggle to understand what is happening in the darkness.
THE TATTOO THIEF by Alison Belsham
(Trapeze £13.99, 384pp) a SeriaL killer who slices the tattoos from his victims’ skin while they are still alive, as part of his ritual, is stalking the streets of Brighton, and his first victim is discovered in a rubbish bin by a female tattoo artist called Marni Mullins.
She knows the world of tattoos only too well, not least because she was married to another tattoo artist for 15 years.
Freshly promoted Di Francis Sullivan, still in his 20s, is given the case, knowing that some of his colleagues, and particularly his own DS rory Mackay, are willing him to fail to prove that he is too inexperienced.
Gradually a portrait of the killer begins to emerge as he attempts to explain his actions in his own words, saying that he is constantly struggling to become the finest collector and preserver of tattooed skin. But why? therein lies the mystery.
Creepy and compulsive, this is Belsham’s first excursion into crime and it announces the arrival of a fine new voice. THE MAN WHO CAME UPTOWN
by George Pelecanos
(Orion £20, 272pp) no one charts the thin grey line that separates the legal from the illegal better than Pelecanos, one of the writers on the television series the Wire. he is, quite simply, among america’s finest crime writers. this latest story does not disappoint.
Phil ornazian is a private investigator who, as times are tough in Washington DC, moonlights as a petty criminal. Meanwhile anna Byrne works as a prison librarian, doing all she can to help the inmates who come to her for books. one of those is Michael hudson, a young offender on remand who develops an insatiable appetite for reading.
ornazian intervenes to persuade the principal witness against hudson to refuse to testify, and the young man is suddenly released. So the three principal characters are bound together.
hudson remains in contact with his librarian mentor and attempts to rebuild his life, while at the same time becoming getaway driver for ornazian in one of his criminal enterprises.
Lyrical, beautifully observed and constantly surprising, it is a delight.