Thrillers
PROVOCATION by Charlotte Grimshaw (Abacus)
Astute businessman Carlos Lehmann takes his capital gains and his family and settles in Seabrooke, a small New Zealand bush community where everyone is so interrelated one thinks immediately of Deliverance. The good folk of Seabrooke, inspired by prejudice (Lehmann is half-Maori, half-white) and greed (he’s bought a large parcel of farmland), turn his life into a nightmare until, provoked beyond bearing, he shoots dead one of his tormenters.
Enter slick, hip 30-something criminal lawyer Stuart Chicane and young law student Stella (no discernible surname). She’s in his thrall, and he finds her useful – as driver, note-taker, researcher, lover; when witnesses grow nervous, he shoves her in to calm them down, then accuses her of a lack of loyalty. Each is convinced the other is having an affair. Both drink too much and hover on the edge of madness.
It’s a marvellous book, well-written, lurching along like a rollercoaster, pausing only briefly at scenes of normality before plunging into the real stuff of the book: sex, drugs, violence, bigotry given suppurating flesh, love turned into obsession.
SOUTHERN CROSS by Patricia Cornwell (Little, Brown)
Writing doesn’t seem to come easily to Patricia Cornwell; one can sense the strain in stilted sentences. Still, one doesn’t read Cornwell for elegance of style, but for plot, pace and gore. Southern Cross is billed as funny, which it’s not, but it does have an interesting plot and a reasonable pace – even if it’s rather short on gore.
Richmond, Virginia, is technically part of the American South, and Cornwell puts three reforming cops there to teach the good ol’ boys some 20th-century methods. They get flak from all directions while trying to deal with juvenile gangs and a computer virus, but the major hassle comes from the people they work with, hidebound Southern cops resisting change. There are some nice characters, like a 14-year-old artist who plays the cymbals, and a cigarette factory worker so paranoid about his name – Butner Fluck – that he’s sure everybody’s always talking about him.
NO SAFE PLACE by Richard North Patterson (Hutchinson)
Kerry Kilcannon, a young Irish senator from New Jersey, is campaigning for a presidential nomination, and a young serial killer is tracking him down. So is the press; post- Clinton, one can hardly feature a fictional American or British politician who doesn’t have an inappropriate liaison somewhere in his background (nor, probably, an actual politician – with the possible exception of Al Gore). In Kilcannon’s case, the woman in question is a journalist who has now been ordered to cover his campaign.
The senator is an appealing character with a tendency to let principles get in the way of his candidacy. Add a running battle over abortion and what seems to be inside stuff on how campaigns are run, and we’ve got a well- written read for a lazy weekend.
ROAD RAGE by Ruth Rendell (Arrow)
Environmental activists have been getting a bad press in the past few years. One must wonder what’s behind the establishment’s over-reaction to concerned citizens trying to save a forest or to free animals from laboratory cages. Ruth Rendell seems to have mounted that bandwagon with this book about a protest that turns nasty. Those activists trying to save trees by living in them are portrayed as silly, not sinister or cruel, but for the rest … Rendell, whose explorations into the psyche of her characters are what sell her books, always takes a long time to get to the point. This one wasn’t quite worth ploughing through.