Short takes: Thrillers

P.D. James: The Murder Room

The murder room of the title is the Dupayne Museum, a privately owned oddity. One room showcases crimes from the years between the wars. The lease is up and the trustees are divided over the museum's future. One is knocked off and Commander Dalgliesh, James' melancholy cop, steps in.

In the opening pages, James describes an afternoon tea. She delights in the "delicate cups with their handles aligned, the thin brown bread and butter, bite-size cucumber sandwiches and home-made sponge and fruitcakes made their expected appearance, brought in by an elderly maid who would have been a gift to a casting agent recruiting actors for an Edwardian soap opera." This meal "was a nostalgic and unhurried ritual". The same might be said of James' Commmander Dalgliesh murder mysteries, her ongoing investigation into the state of Dalgliesh's emotional life an "unhurried ritual". He has finally, perhaps, found love. For Dalgliesh, however, joy is always "precarious". Charming, unhurried and unsullied with blood splatters and dubiously drawn psychotic serial killers.

Faber and Faber, $36.95

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Simon Kernick: The Murder Exchange

Max Iversson, ex-mercenary now running a private security business, doesn't have much of a personal life. Neither does detective sergeant John Gallan. This is about all these two hard men have in common until Iversson stumbles into a set-up which adds more than a bit of excitement to his life. A security job goes wrong, there are dead bodies all over the place and Iversson ends up on the run. Gallan is not far behind him. Kernick creates a terrific sense of the chase. The characters don't meet until the last pages of the book, but their stories place them just a few paces from each other throughout. This is sharp-edged crime writing with pace and style, cracker dialogue and complicated characters.

Bantam Press, $34.95

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Robert B. Parker: Shrink Rap

Pi Sunny Randall is "slim, cute and tougher than a boiled shoe". This is according to best-selling bodice-ripper writer Melanie Joan Hall, who is being stalked by her psycho psychiatrist former husband. Melanie hires Sunny to protect her from the nutjob who, it turns out, has been drugging his exclusively female clients and giving them a little extra therapy on his shrink's couch. Parker doesn't so much as write a book as wisecrack his way through the pages. Funny, sassy and smart.

No Exit Press, $29.95

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Sue Grafton: Q is for Quarry

Grafton's perky girl detective Kinsey Millhone turns 37, is still unattached, living her "stripped-down existence untroubled by bairn, pets or living household plants". Grafton has created an existence for Kinsey based around her neighbourhood in Santa Theresa, California. But when Grafton gets to Z, does Kinsey get the big K for killed off? It seems unlikely. The alphabet books are bestsellers: Kinsey is a likeable sort of character and the stories are competently told. The writing's nothing flash, but the plots are twisty enough to keep you turning. In Q two detectives - nice old guys nearing retirement - ask Kinsey to help them to solve an 18-year-old crime: a Jane Doe found bound and stabbed. All of which is an excuse for an entertaining road trip with two geriatric cops who sure love their junk food.

Label: Pan, $22.95

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Peter Robinson: The Summer That Never Was

When Chief Inspector Alan Banks was a lad his 14-year-old mate, Graham, went missing. Now a skeleton has been found. He goes home to help investigate and sleeps in the single bed of his boyhood. Past meets present in his dreams. "As he drifted towards sleep, he imagined his mother calling him for school in the morning." As he walks out the door into the warm air and bright blue skies of the long summers of childhood, he finds a cast of characters waiting for him. Among them is Graham, whose death he must resolve in order to come to terms with his own life. Robinson writes deft, elegant crime; spend a wet weekend with this one.

Macmillan, $22.95