Short takes: Thrillers

Reviewed by MICHELE HEWITSON

George P. Pelecanos: Soul Circus

Soul Circus picks up from where Pelecanos left off with Hell to Pay. Which means it picks up the intriguing story of cop Derek Strange's love/hate affair with justice.

Granville Oliver is on death row. He's a drug dealer, a murderer and a corrupter of the young black men who wander the ghettos of Washington DC looking for a way into the criminal underground as a way out of their miserable home lives. These are the young men Strange spends his life trying to save. So why is Strange standing up for Oliver's right to live?

Pelecanos just gets better and better: he pushes you to the edge of understanding, challenges, probes, and writes of hope and despair like an angel with a broken wing and a hangover.

(Orion, $35)

* * *

Donna Leon: Uniform Justice

They do death well in Venice. Lovely setting for a murder. In Leon's books you get a good feed too. At least her melancholic copper, Commissario Brunetti, gets to eat well.

For Brunetti fine clothes, fine art and fine food are talismans against the dreary horror that is his life.

Here he is on soup: "He breathed deeply, hoping that the garlic would drive the misery out. If it could drive away vampires, then surely it could work its herbal magic against something as banal as misery."

The plot? Oh, that's pretty good too: a boy is found dead in Venice's top military academy. Brunetti has to deal with elitism, cover-ups and bungling bureaucrats.

(William Heinemann, $34.95)

* * *

Linda Fairstein: The Bone Vault

Jolly good place for a murder, a big old museum, I've always thought. All those long-dead things, what's a body or so more?

There are rich pickings in the Museum of Natural History. Assistant District Attorney Alex Cooper returns to find out what happened to a missing intern whose body has turned up in a sarcophagus.

There's plenty of scope here for horror: there are jars of bugs and other creepy things in those vaults, and some very peculiar people who have been living among jars of oddities for longer than anyone can remember.

The book is exhaustively researched - among her reference texts the fascinating-sounding Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads - but Fairstein does rather lay it on.

(Little Brown, $34.95)

* * *

Gillian White: Copycat

Jeannie and Martha are unlikely friends. Jeannie's a control freak, Martha's a slob. Jeannie's uptight and suspicious, Martha's easy going and everyone's buddy. Jeannie's husband is a bit of a bore, Martha's husband is dashing and creative.

One of these women is going to end up killing the other. The supposed trick is to guess whodunnit.

The suburban claustrophobia is nicely evoked but White employs an irritating and lazy device to keep the guessing game going: each chapter begins with the last line of the previous chapter. And both women are so awful you hope that neither survives the final, all too predictable, pages.

(Bantam Press, $34.95)

* * *

Liz Rigbey: Summertime

Lucy Schaffer is a high flyer on Wall St. She lives alone, a long way from her family. Back home, which Lucy hasn't visited in years, are her father and sister, her ex-husband and her child's grave.

Then Lucy gets a call telling her that her father, a kindly, respected retired geology professor, is dead. His body is fished out of the sea and he didn't fall and he didn't jump.

There's something badly wrong with this little family, and with this little family's history. Who is repressing what memory?

Nicely paced, nicely nasty, but it does rather signal the culprit with all the subtlety of an axe in the head.

(Michael Joseph, $34.95)