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Sue Green

Gone to Ground

by John Harvey

Heinemann, HK$281

The Savage Altar

by Asa Larsson

Viking, HK$281

The Watchman

by Robert Crais

Orion, HK$240

John Harvey  made his name with  a gritty series featuring Nottingham detective Charlie Resnick.   When he ended it after 10 volumes, devotees were outraged.

Hoping not to fall into that  trap again, Harvey  kept his recent Frank Elder thriller series to just three -  but again his fans protested.

Now he has declared his intention to write stand-alones, as he did between the two series with the wonderful In a True Light. Gone to Ground, a police procedural set mostly in Cambridge, but also in  the Fens and Nottingham, is supposedly the first of these - although it remains to be seen whether he can resist revisiting the excellent team of  thirtysomething Detective Inspector Will Grayson, juggling the competing demands of job, marriage and small children, and his single sidekick detective, Sergeant Helen Walker, an equally well-developed character.

The pair are investigating the  murder of gay film studies academic Stephen Bryan. At first, his spurned lover seems the most likely culprit.  It then emerges that he was writing a biography of Stella Leonard, a B-grade movie star who died in a car crash eerily similar to the ending of her best movie. There are excerpts from the film script throughout.

Bryan's computer and part-written manuscript are missing,  and Leonard's family - in particular, a property developer with an unsavoury reputation -  tried to block his research. Did he get  too close to family secrets? His  sister Lesley, a BBC Nottingham journalist,  resolves to find out.  But she soon discovers that it's a dangerous game.

Harvey's characters are always a product of their social and economic circumstances and Gone to Ground is set in the context of gay-bashing by disaffected youths, although it lacks the biting social comment of the Resnick series. But it is - as with all Harvey's fiction - well paced, credible and engaging. The prose is spare and unaffected, but  written with empathy for characters in difficult, sometimes tragic situations often not of their own making.

And it has that nice Harvey  touch for long-time readers -  small mentions of, and cameos by, characters from previous books.

Whereas Harvey, now in his  60s, is one of crime fiction's grand masters, Asa  Larsson  is a new- comer, the latest of  a rich crop  of Scandinavian crime writers  published in English.

She makes her debut with impressive credentials: this first novel, featuring lawyer Rebecka Martinsson,  won Sweden's best first crime novel award and her second Martinsson thriller is already scheduled for publication next year.

The Savage Altar pulls no punches from the outset. Subtitled 'Innocence will be slaughtered', it opens with a vicious  knife murder in a church at night, the dying victim on his back, watching through the  skylights as the aurora borealis 'twists and turns like a dragon' in the dark winter sky.

He is Viktor Strandgard, a charismatic preacher who, after a near-death experience following  a car crash, helped build a cult- like revivalist church in whose headquarters he now lies dead,  his eyes  gouged  and his intestines  spilling forth.

The church is rich and powerful and its influence in the far northern Swedish town of Kiruna, where The Savage Altar is set, is pervasive. That influence is central to Larsson's bleak and atmospheric story, as Martinsson, a Stockholm tax lawyer, heeds the pleas of her childhood friend Sanna, Strandgard's sister who found his body, to fly north  to help her.

Martinsson thought she had broken free of both Kiruna -  Larsson's real home town  - and the church, after leaving under a cloud many years earlier. But when she  decides to discover who killed  Strandgard after an ambitious prosecutor charges the mentally fragile Sanna with the crime, she discovers that escape isn't so easy.

The police - in particular, pregnant Inspector Anna-Maria Mella - methodically set about hunting the killer, despite the prosecutor's insistence that Sanna is the culprit. And as Martinsson  also digs into the church's shady affairs, she confronts her own past, risking both life and career.

Despite  an unduly heavy emphasis on  religion,  it's  a promising debut from Larsson,  even though the identity of the killer, revealed well before the end, is no great surprise. And the cover line announcing  the book as the first of  a series defuses any tension involving the fate of Martinsson - she lives to  feature in a sequel.

Robert Crais  is everything Larsson is not. An award-winning crime-fiction  writer, his 13 novels are published in 36 languages. Before turning to thriller writing he was a successful Hollywood screenwriter for top-rating shows such as Hill Street Blues.

Crais has the runs on the board and it shows. His writing is slick, his stories well-crafted and the pace speedy enough to keep the pages turning yet not so relentless there's no time for character development.

The Watchman marks the return of his popular private eye Elvis Cole, although this time Cole plays second fiddle to his partner, hard man Joe Pike, an ex-marine and ex-cop who finds himself playing bodyguard to a Los Angeles rich girl when a former colleague calls in a favour.

Pretty, spoiled, 22-year-old Larkin Conner Barkley becomes an  endangered federal witness after seeing a crime boss flee the scene of a car crash. But when the bad guys repeatedly track down Pike and his wayward charge he realises that someone on the inside is helping them. The only way to keep the unco-operative Larkin safe is to tell no one except Elvis where they are while he finds out who wants her dead and why.

The answer at first seems straightforward, but there's  no such thing as Crais' switchback plot unfolds. And the surprises aren't all in the tale of organised crime and corruption. The Watchman is an incisive study of two very different people thrown reluctantly together in the  deadliest circumstances.  It's much more than a well-crafted manhunt. Crais also writes about building trust, the insidious effects of fear, the need for a parent's love and the  corrosive impact of loving a parent who abuses that love.

Crais pushes all the buttons yet leaves his reader no sense of having been manipulated. Rather, the reader is taken along for a high-speed ride laced with heartache and human frailties.



Crime fiction