Short takes: Thrillers

Reviewed by MICHELE HEWITSON

Simon Tolkien: The Stepmother

Yes, he is the grandson of J.R.R. No, there's not a hobbity thing in sight.

What there is, is a tightly written suspense story about an evil stepmother and a young boy. And we all know that in real fairy tales there are no happy endings.

In an old family home by the sea, the romantically named House of the Four Winds, a boy, Thomas, with an overactive imagination, and his dreamy mother live in isolation. The father, a high-profile Minister of Defence, lives mostly in London and has come to depend on his secretary, the beautiful young Greta.

One night men come to the House of the Four Winds, and bang, bang, Mummy is dead.

Guess who marries Daddy?

Guess who Thomas thinks has hired the men to kill Mummy?

A fairly standard courtroom drama, but nicely told, with echoes of a fairy story turned very chilly indeed.

(Michael Joseph, $34.95)

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Dennis Lehane: Shutter Island

Shutter Island is where the Massachusetts Department of Mental Health keeps its criminally insane. It is bleak and rugged. A place of no escape.

On a day in 1954, two US Marshals arrive on the island to help to search for a murderess who appears to have escaped from the inescapable. But there is nowhere to go except off the rocks into the chilly sea - and there is no body. There are also rumours about drugs on the island.

This is Marshal Teddy Daniel's story. It's a great thriller from the great Lehane.

You read as though through a fog of some experimental drug designed to bewilder. On Shutter Island everything is seen through a fug of sea mists and the storm which cuts the island off from all contact with the real world.

(Bantam Press, $34.95)

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Frances Fyfield: Seeking Sanctuary

Fyfield's great talent is to assemble a group of unlikely - and often unlikeable - characters and set them loose inside strange, cloistered communities.

Seeking Sanctuary is set within the walls - and from outside the walls, peering in - of the Blessed Sacrament Convent. Sisters Isabel and Therese have sought sanctuary within these walls since they were taken here as children by their pious mother. Their father, Theodore, rich and worldly, abandoned the family.

Now he is dead and has left a will which leaves his estate to his estranged daughters on the condition that they remain free of sin for two years.

It is an odd will, especially considering that one of his daughters is a nun.

As news of the will is spread within the community, a golden boy, Francis, arrives to become the nun's handyman/saviour.

Claustrophobic, nasty characters, twisty plot. Fyfield at her readable best.

(Little, Brown, $34.95)

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Tony Strong: Tell Me Lies

Ros Taylor wakes one day to a nightmare: her flatmate and best friend, Jo, has been raped and stabbed to death. Ros has been drugged, she may have been raped. She can remember nothing.

During the course of the investigation Ros forms a relationship with the investigating detective. He tells her that he knows who committed the crime, but that without Ros' evidence - of which she has no memory - the police cannot prosecute.

Between them, detective and victim, they concoct a memory which may or may not contain the truth. Ros is well-placed to produce fakes: her job is to forensically examine art works to establish authenticity.

Based on a true story which has been fictionalised at least in part to avoid the possibility of litigation, Tell Me Lies is a challenging account of the way memory can work to serve a desire for justice over truth.

(Bantam Press, $34.95)

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Val McDermid: The Distant Echo

Four drunk male students stumble across a young woman dying in the snow. They try to save her life, fail, and in that attempt become prime suspects.

Cleared, they go on to live their adult lives, until, 25 years later, somebody begins knocking them off, one by one.

Somebody is out to revenge the death of Rosie Duff, the girl in the snow.

Deft and detailed - McDermid knows how to roll out a yarn which sustains its intrigue over those years and across the pages.

(Harper Collins $31.99)