Short takes: Thrillers

By MICHELE HEWITSON

Mark Billingham: Lazy Bones

Detective Inspector Thorne has a liking for country music, is lazy about relationships and keen on curries. He is also one of the best crime characters created in a long time. This is Billingham's third Thorne novel - and they just keep getting better. He writes about murder and menace with a finely tuned ear for moral ambiguity. In Lazy Bones someone is luring recently released sex offenders to hotels, sodomising them, then knocking them off. It's Thorne's job to catch the killer - but who cares about sex offenders? That's a tricky story to tell without falling into myriad moral traps. Billingham pulls it off with nicely observed characters - he's particularly good on male relationships - a ripper of a story and tight writing. Terrific.

Little, Brown, $34.95

* * *

Frances Fyfield: The Playroom

OOH, this is a very nasty little domestic thriller. The Allendales are a couple with everything going for them: money, charm, two lovely children. Then David Allendale begins to believe that the daughter is not his child. He turns very nasty indeed. He creates a playroom for the daughter, and pockets the key. Reading this is like being locked inside an airless room with little prospect of escape. Fyfield writes razor-sharp prose honed on dangerous edges of family life.

Time Warner, $22.95

* * *

Peter Robinson: Caedmon's Song

Another treat from Robinson who, like Billingham, is turning out to be one of the new(ish) stars of the Brit thriller writer pack. In Whitby, on the Yorkshire Coast, a woman called Martha arrives to, she says, research a book. In Birmingham, a young student called Kirsten is attacked walking home to her flat. She remembers almost nothing about the attack. Martha is really searching for revenge; Kirsten is searching for the memory of the attack. How their stories are entwined would be giving it away, but there is a real twist in this cleverly told tale.

(Macmillan, $37.95)

* * *

David McGill: The Monstrance

A homegrown mystery which is as much coming of age novel as it is a story of a stolen religious relic. In this book, set in West Auckland and on Waiheke Island during the tail-end of the 50s, Steve McCann makes friends with Croatian immigrant Denko Petrovich. They meet at church as altar boys. They become entangled in the secret of the monstrance - the ornamental device which holds the consecrated host - which leads them to discover some truths about their fathers who died in a suspicious accident. The boys discover sex - there's plenty of teenage panting - and the big OE which takes them on a nightmare trip to Yugoslavia and inside hippy, trippy London of the swinging 60s. This is a bad trip, literally. They are implicated in a drug bust, deported, and arrive back on Waiheke to find more hippies, communes, dykes and some real nasties. A well-constructed tale, with believable characters and unbelievable twists. And some awful typos.

(Silver Owl Press)

* * *

Dan Fesperman: The Small Boat Of Great Sorrows

Vlaso Petric, a former cop who has fled Sarajevo with his wife and child, spends his days deep in the mud of the building sites of Berlin. He has a melancholy, a longing for home, as sticky and layered as the German mud he wades in daily. When an American investigator from the International War Crimes Tribunal turns up to ask for his help in setting up a sting to arrest the man responsible for the massacre of Srebrenica, Petric grabs the chance to go home. Petric will discover much more than war secrets: there are family secrets and his own complicated relationship with his homeland to unravel. A tense and clever thriller with heart.

(Bantam Press, $34.95)