Curtain up on a killer scene
WHEN DARKNESS CALLS by Mark Griffin (Piatkus £13.99, 400 pp)
GRIFFIN, who appeared as Trojan in ITV’s Gladiators in the Nineties, became a successful screenwriter in LA before returning to England.
This is his crime debut, and it is mightily impressive. It introduces Holly Wakefield, a NHS criminal psychologist who specialises in the analysis and treatment of serial killers.
She is approached by the Metropolitan Police’s DI Bishop to investigate a killer whose
modus operandi is to pose the victims’ dismembered bodies in theatrical positions.
Deviously plotted, with a bleak thread of intriguing twists, it reveals that Holly has much more experience in matters of murder than may meet the eye. Her partnership with Bishop is deftly portrayed, and she’s a character we are destined to hear far more of.
Not surprisingly from a screenwriter, it has all the makings of a TV series — think Cracker but with a sympathetic, if troubled, female protagonist.
DEADLAND by William Shaw (Riverrun £16.99, 480 pp)
SHAW has made the bleak and inhospitable Kent coastline one of the principal characters in his mysteries, and he is back there again in this second outing for his heroine, DS Alexandra Cupidi.
It opens spectacularly with two 17-year-old misfits stealing a mobile phone on their motorcycle, only to discover that they have stumbled into a crime way out of their league.
The owner of the phone wants it back, and will go to any lengths to get it — including murder. So the boys hide out in a derelict building on the Kent marshes.
Meanwhile, DS Cupidi is investigating the discovery of a severed human arm that has been hidden inside a modern sculpture at Margate’s Turner Contemporary art museum.
As DS Cupidi’s case turns darker, she begins to fear for the two runaway boys who are the same age as her own rebellious daughter.
THEIR LITTLE SECRET by Mark Billingham (Little Brown £18.99, 400 pp) LONDON-BASED DI Tom Thorne, Billingham’s lead detective, has established himself as one of the most compelling figures in contemporary crime fiction — assisted by his sceptical partner DI Nicola Tanner.
Thorne is everything that a
fine detective should be: compassionate, unpredictable and curious — with a passion for doing the right thing, even if he sometimes has to bend the rules to do it.
Here, Thorne is convinced that a woman who has just killed herself by diving under a Tube train in North London was forced to do it by a predatory conman who had persuaded her to part with £75,000 of her savings.
The conman may also be a killer, and could have a female accomplice.
Beautifully constructed and written, it pulses with the humanity that is Billingham’s — and Thorne’s — trademark.