Short takes: Thrillers

Reviewed by MICHELE HEWITSON


Steven Bochco: Death by Hollywood

By the creator of Hill Street Blues, LA Law and NYPD Blue, Death by Hollywood is a slick, fast read with more sex than you can get away with even on HBO. He knows what he's doing and he intimately knows the characters he's writing about: the Hollywood writers, the agents, the actors, the cops. Everyone is on the make. Especially the writer with writer's block, Bobby Newman. His wife has left, his agent has dumped him, so he drinks more and spends his nights spying on the neighbours through his telescope. He witnesses a murder: the stunning wife of an obese, sicko Hollywood player bashes her Latin actor lover of the head with one of his own acting awards. Newman doesn't go to the cops. He's a writer and even in his sorry state he knows a good story when he spies on one. The cop will come to him. And so we enter another story: the one about whose story this really is and who stands to gain the most by selling it. Lovely twists, great pace, it will keep you very warm on the beach this summer.

Bloomsbury, $35

* * *

Pierre Magnan: The Murdered House

A new translation of the 1984 La Maison Assassinee, The Murdered House is a strange, sparse, tale - as much ghost story as murder mystery. Set in a remote part of Provence, in 1896, a family is murdered. The only survivor is a baby who grows up to become Seraphin Monge, a soldier. In 1920 he returns home and begins to demolish the family home in an attempt to quiet the ghosts. As the house is reduced to stones, the real story emerges. Or so Seraphin believes. He thinks he has identified the three murderers and decides he will kill them, one by one, with the same care and barely buried rage with which he has demolished his house. But before he can carry out his murders, someone else does it for him. A wonderful sense of place and a genuinely frightening story which, oddly, has the peculiar effect of making you want to go to this part of the world.

Vintage, $26.95

* * *

Minette Walters: Disordered Minds

The body in Minette Walters' latest is long cold. And the murderer, a retarded 20-year old convicted of killing his grandmother, has long ago killed himself in prison. The case would have been long forgotten but for an anthropologist and famous author, Dr Jonathan Hughes, who decides to reinvestigate the case for a book on people wrongly convicted. Hughes is black, a snob (who happens to be almost impoverished) and a bullied kid who grew up to become something of a bully himself. His companion in the case - he has reluctantly accepted her help - is George Gardener, "an earnest little bumpkin with ... terrible fashion sense and [a] bulky body."

This unlikely couple - and Hughes is very difficult to like - set out on investigation of a very cold crime which is as much an investigation of Hughes' self-imposed loneliness and an odd but oddly endearing working arrangement which will become a friendship. But the solving of the crime becomes peripheral and the narrative becomes bogged down in Walters' penchant for breaking up the text with faux newspaper clippings and emails.

Allen & Unwin, $35

* * *

Richard North Patterson: Balance of Power

This one has holiday-season blockbuster and future movie written all over it: literally, the blurb sounds like the film pitch. It goes like this: newly elected President Kilcannon gets married to his long-time secret lover, high-profile telly journo Lara Costello. On the way home from the wedding, Lara's family are shot by her sister's abusive husband. Kilcannon, already the arch-enemy of the gun-lobby group, Sons of the Second Amendment, resolves to stop the carnage of "innocents". So we have political intrigue: good man pitted against bad men with guns. Guilt: the President had stuck his nose into the sister's relationship. Love: the President and Lara. And so on.

It labours a little under its anti-gun laws message, but it will shoot out the shots faster than a bullet.

Macmillan, $37.95

* * *

V.L. McDermid: Hostage to Murder

McDermid resurrects her hard-hack lesbian character Lindsay Gordon because, she writes, she was invited to Russia and wanted to set a book there. Which seems a fairly thin reason for setting up an elaborate kidnapping which involves, yes, a trail which leads to St Petersburg. And this is a fairly thin read from the usually very good McDermid. It also has some jarringly hard-to-swallow plot developments, including the one involving the journalist who sets up shop in the local pub, where whistleblowers can come to tell their stories. In total privacy, of course.

Harper Collins, $21.99