JAMES LEE BURKE
JESUS OUT TO SEA (Orion)
The power of James Lee Burke’s writing comes from its jolting combination of lyricism and dirty realism. Approaching the eleven short stories collected in Jesus Out To Sea I was concerned that the lyricism (and occasional prolixity) of his novels would overwhelm the pared down requirements of the shorter form. However, this collection is a triumph - moving, compassionate and tough.
Burke doesn’t go for the last-paragraph twists or neat resolutions of the conventional crime story. These stories are about real people living messy open-ended lives. Written over a 15 year period, they explore the familiar themes of his novels: poor people struggling to survive with dignity; the ugliness of the human heart set against the harsh beauty of nature; good versus evil; men and violence.
There are two wrenching stories (including the titular piece) about hurricane Katrina. Two others - Winter Light and A Season of Regret - written years apart, both tell the story of loners who have renounced violent pasts for academia only to have violence thrust upon them.
The best stories seem autobiographical in their accounts of growing up poor in the late forties. Texas City1947, The Molester, The Burning of The Flag and Bugsy Was My Friend are all strong and moving accounts of boys having to figure out, in face of aggression and duplicitous adults, what it means to be a man. Although there are women in these stories, it is a macho man's world Burke explores. And he is easily the equal of Cormac McCarthy in doing so.
J L CARRELL
THE SHAKESPEARE SECRET (Sphere)
J L Carrell's debut novel, The Shakespeare Secret initially perplexed me. In the US it's known as Interred With Their Bones by Jennifer Lee Carrell. Although there is more than one secret in the novel I could understand the title change as the publisher is promoting it as Da Vinci Code meets Labyrinth. But why only Jennifer Lee's initials?
Then it started shakily with unconvincingly executed suspense and action scenes. The (early) moment a meeting was arranged on lonely Parliament Hill at dusk, with no explanation ever given for the choice of dodgy venue, I knew I was in a novel where character served the need of narrative. And, indeed, the central character - an academic-turned- theatre director who thinks directing Hamlet at the Globe is the apogee of a theatrical career - comes to terms with the fact her life is in danger remarkably quickly and almost from the outset is running, racing and generally flinging herself in and out of danger.
She's in danger because she holds the clue to the aforementioned various Shakespearian secrets and a killer - who is offing people in some of the gory ways that Shakespearean characters die - wants the clue and the secrets.
There are some two dimensional characters, including an elderly millionaire collector of Shakespeariana who, even so, knows her way around guns with silencers on them, and an equally ancient gay theatrical knight capable of strenuous deeds of derring-do. (Think Sir John Gielgud as ninja warrior.)
However, despite all that, I enjoyed this novel. What kept me turning the pages was the deft way the academic author (who has degrees from Harvard, Stanford and Oxford) handles a vast amount of interesting information about Shakespeare and his time. She slides into her narrative all the existing theories about Shakespeare’s identity and about his missing works and weaves it all together into an ingenious plot that more than makes up for the wobbliness of the narrative.
JAMES E CHERRY
SHADOW OF LIGHT (Serpent's Tail)
James E. Cherry is a Tennessee-based African-American poet with an intensity in his verse which carries over into his debut novel Shadow of Light. This unconventional look at racial tension in a backwater Southern town is written in fervid, almost hallucinatory prose.
The narrator is the senior black cop in a backwater southern town. When his grandmother is raped and shot by a gang of white teenagers his desire for revenge competes with his wish to keep the lid on the racial violence simmering in the community. Plus his own life is in chaos: his wife has tired of his infidelities and his black power, drug-lord nephew is keen to start the riots.
Cherry, according to the publisher's biography, had a mid-twenties "spiritual, mental and cultural awakening" - for which, I'm guessing, read religion. Your response to the God stuff in the novel I leave to you. For the rest, this is an unorthodox but powerful crime novel; Cherry is a compelling new voice in the genre.
MICHAEL HARVEY
THE CHICAGO WAY (Quercus)
Michael Harvey’s debut novel starts like a cross between Chandler's Farewell My Lovely and The Long Goodbye. Chicago private investigator Michael Kelly is asked by his former partner to investigate an old rape-and-battery case that 8 years earlier his friend had been ordered to forget. Then the partner is killed and Kelly is off on a convoluted search for serial rapists and their victims.
Kelly narrates in an engaging tone of voice but the mood darkens after the jokey start. There are a couple of powerful plot twists: one (involving a friend's betrayal) you can see coming, the other you probably can't. Harvey, creator of the US TV series Cold Case Files, writes confidently and his Irish PI is a strong creation, though his classical scholarship sits oddly with his fast fists. I look forward to more.
IAN RANKIN
EXIT MUSIC (Orion)
Ian Rankin's 18th John Rebus novel, Exit Music, has an elegiac tone - but then it marks the truculent policeman's last week on the job before retirement. Not that he's going to go quietly, of course. He and DS Siobhan Clarke are investigating the death of a dissident Russian poet in what looks like a mugging gone wrong. A high level delegation of Russian businessmen is also in town so Scottish politicians and bankers want the case closed quickly.
The obstinate and bloody-minded Rebus is not a man who can be told what to do and the more he and Clarke dig the more suspicious the death becomes. Then when Big Ger Cafferty seems somehow connected there?s no way that Rebus is going to let it rest - the Edinburgh crime boss comes under the heading of unfinished business.
I've always imagined Rebus and James Lee Burke's Dave Robicheaux are distant relatives since they share the trait of being their own worst enemies. Like Robicheaux, Rebus would probably solve his cases much quicker if he didn?t get so easily riled when questioning people. But where would be the fun in that?
In Exit Music he rubs up the wrong way pretty much everybody he comes across -including, naturally, his superiors. I can't for a moment believe this will be the last Rebus novel but it's definitely the end of a very long chapter. As such it's melancholy and moving but Rankin retains his sharp eye for what is going on in contemporary Scotland and Exit Music is as cunningly plotted as anything he's done before. Encore.
VAL MCDERMID
BENEATH THE BLEEDING (HarperCollins)
If Rankin is the king of British crime, Val McDermid is undoubtedly the queen. She starts her latest novel, Beneath The Bleeding, almost in Rankin style by listing the music she listened to whilst writing it.
The fifth outing for psychological profiler Tony Hill and DCI Carol Jordan involve them in a search for a mass murderer who blows up Bradfield?s football stadium, killing dozens and injuring many more. This is just after the town's star midfielder has been murdered.
Jordan investigates but Hill is almost sidelined as he is confined to a hospital bed after an operation on his knee. (McDermid had major knee surgery last year too.) He tries to make sense of the bits of information he can get but Jordan isn't in the mood to listen to him. She?s fighting hard to stop the intelligence services from interfering in her case - they think the bomber was a terrorist.
Hill and Jordan are both compelling creations and their encounters in Beneath The Bleeding fairly crackle. McDermid is a consummate plotter so there are pleasing twists and turns in this first-rate story. And we get to meet Hill?s mum.
NICK STONE
KING OF SWORDS (Michael Joseph)
Rankin and McDermid are at the top of the crime-writing tree but there's always someone shaking the branches. Nick Stone had an award-winning debut with Mr Clarinet last year. With his second novel, King of Swords, its prequel, he really gets into his stride.
It's 1981 and Max Mingus is part of a special police task force in Miami, hitting drug dealers hard. He and his partner, Joe Liston, a dignified African-American in a predominantly racist force, investigate the death of a Haitian man at a Primate Park.
The autopsy reveals in the man's stomach a half digested tarot card, the King of Swords. Mingus and Liston go to talk to the man's family to find it has been slaughtered. A bloody trail leads them via a creepy fortune-teller and her pimp son towards Mingus's first encounter with the nightmarish Solomon Boukman, his nemesis in Mr Clarinet.
There?s a heady mix of voodoo, violence and police corruption in King of Swords and some unforgettable characters. There?s a fat hit man with a sweet tooth - or rather teeth as he wears various sets of dentures, including one made from piranha teeth. And there's the pimp who begins as a hate figure but grows on you as he flails around trying to find a way out of his squalid life.
This is brilliantly assured storytelling: fast-paced, funny, frightening - and even better than Mr Clarinet.
ALEX SCARROW
LAST LIGHT (Orion)
Alex Scarrow had an accomplished debut last year with A Thousand Suns. His second novel, Last Light is about as ambitious a thriller as you're going to find, yoking together, as it does, a tense story of a man trying to get back from Iraq to his family in England with a chilling depiction of complete social breakdown around the world.
The starting point is a temporary halt to global oil production. Within days this has led to food riots, looting and violence in London and other cities around the world. Andy Sutherland, a civil engineer, is trapped in Iraq with a company of British soldiers in hiding from militia men. Desperate to get home to protect his children he begins to realise that, amid all the chaos, somebody is specifically targetting his family. A thrilling read.
PATRICK QUINLAN
THE TAKEDOWN (Headline)
Patrick Quinlan's follow-up to his assured debut, 'Smoked', is a well-plotted New York thriller which begins when ex-con, Dick, wakes up with a bad hangover, no memory of recent events and his boss/former lover dead in the boot of his car. In trying to figure out how she got there this apparent tough guy (who has been trying to go straight by working as a typist) tussles with an obsessive computer nerd, a beautiful but ruthless hooker, a transsexual looking for love, and your obligatory psycho hit-man.
With that set-up you'd think the plot would virtually write itself but Quinlan delights in wrong-footing the reader. This is a fast-moving, hugely entertaining thriller - though the disposal of the dead woman's body is its gruesome underbelly.
WILLIAM GAY
TWILIGHT (Faber)
William Gay's 'Twilight' is Southern Gothic at its dark, deviant best. Teenage siblings in a small Tennessee town in the 1950s discover - by exhuming bodies in the local graveyard - that the local undertaker has a penchant for grotesquely mistreating corpses before he buries them. When their blackmail plans go awry, they head for the Harrikin, a spooky, lawless wilderness, with a psycho killer on their trail.
The Harrikin is peopled by scary outsiders but then nobody is normal in this modern Hansel and Gretel story. The undertaker's most innocent act is sitting a corpse down to listen to the radio with him. The psycho killer is a bogeyman with quasi-supernatural powers - part Robert Mitchum's mad preacher in 'The Night of the Hunter', part Robert Johnson's 'Hellhound on the trail'.
Gay is a wonderful prose stylist and his language is worth lingering over. He eschews conventional suspense by giving away pretty much the whole story at the start of the novel but it doesn't matter: the characters are vivid, the scenes original, the sense of menace intense. Not for the squeamish, 'Twilight' is one of the finest novels I've read this year.
