The Burnt House

by Faye Kellerman

William Morrow, HK$214

Dead Connection

by Alafair Burke

Orion, HK$165

A wry humour occasionally leaches into Mark Billingham's dark and violent stories, but murder's generally no laughing matter. In fact, it's quite a leap from comedy to crime fiction, but Billingham has successfully straddled the divide.

The Birmingham-born former television writer and stand-up comic - he still performs on occasion - has grown into his characters, his writing more assured with each new novel featuring Inspector Tom Thorne and his various dysfunctional sidekicks.

Death Message is the seventh in the series and the writing is confident, the characters credible, interesting and - something Billingham was determined would be a hallmark of his work - unpredictable.

The death message, a photo-graph of an unknown man, arrives on Thorne's mobile phone while he's indulging in his latest hobby, online poker - 'He knew that he was looking at a murder victim' - and it's not long before Thorne is looking at the subject in the flesh, on a slab in the morgue. His tattoos are a clue to the company he'd been keeping: a motorcycle gang.

Soon there are more corpses with links to the gang and to the investigation of the murder of its former leader six years earlier. The man convicted of that killing has just been released from jail, filled with anger at the news of a vicious hit and run. Instead of going home to his wife and child he'll be visiting them in the cemetery.

You don't have to be Einstein to work out that it's parolee Marcus Brooks who's doing the killing - or, at least, most of it. But Billingham has written much more than a 'catch him if you can' chase story. The plot is complex and interesting, complete with bent cops and internal investigations. And for those who like their crime laced with a dash of personal issues, there's Thorne's relationship with DI Louise Porter and the question of whether the commitment she's looking for is one he's willing to make.

Faye Kellerman, too, built her reputation on a series detective, LA homicide cop Peter Decker. In the more than 20 years since she began the series she has, like Billingham, grown as a writer, and in confidence, moving from a reluctance even to be interviewed with her best-selling crime writer husband Jonathan Kellerman lest she be thought to be cashing in on his success, to achieving international best-seller status in her own right.

Kellerman now also writes books with her husband and has stepped away from her Decker series with successful stand-alones. But for her fans a return to the series is welcome news. The Burnt House is the 12th, with Decker investigating the fates of two women. One, a flight attendant, was initially thought to have been

on a plane that crashed into a Los Angeles house, killing all on board. But her father believes she was killed by her philandering husband for the insurance payout.

The other is found when police scour the crash site for remains - but this is an old skeleton, unearthed from the burnt apartment house's 1970s foundations.

As we've come to expect from Kellerman, the writing is slick and the pace ensures mounting tension, as Decker works overtime to identify the unexpected corpse, discover whether the missing woman was on the plane, and solve what may be two murders.

But there are two prerequisites for enjoying The Burnt House. One is an interest in the numerous diversions into the private life of Decker and his feisty wife, Rina Lazarus; his daughter Cindy's home renovations: Rina's views on life and religion (Kellerman is Jewish, as are Decker and Lazarus, and Judaism plays a significant role in her books). The other is a willingness to accept the huge coincidence on which the plot and its ultimate resolution are predicated. It's entertaining, but just not credible. Suspend belief and enjoy the ride.

Alafair Burke is still building her reputation, but she got off to a good start with the first three thrillers in her Samantha Kincaid series. Now, Dead Connection introduces new characters - rookie detective Ellie Hatcher, the daughter of a cop whose death was declared a suicide but who she believes was murdered, and rebel homicide detective Flann McIlroy, who seconds her to his investigation when he spies a link between two killings.

Burke and Kellerman have something in common: a famous relation. As the daughter of author James Lee Burke, she's a publicist's godsend, but also has the credentials of so many best-selling crime writers: a legal background. New York-based Burke is a former deputy district attorney and is now an associate professor of criminal law at Hofstra Law School.

Burke has managed to get a favourable blurb from no less a crime writer than Tess Gerritsen to grace her cover, and - unlike so much 'you scratch my back' praise - this is richly deserved.

Dead Connection is a contemporary thriller that covers some much-travelled territory in focusing on the world of online dating, but it does so in a fresh and engaging way. Both the women killed met a succession of creeps via the services of FirstDate, an online agency, and that's where Flann and Hatcher begin, with Hatcher - young, pretty and fitting the victims' profile - going online under a series of fake identities.

But when a third murder is linked to the first two, a Russian stripper who was shot with the same gun as one of the FirstDate women, they must try to find the connection between the deaths to find the killer. As they investigate, a renegade FBI agent is in the wings to thwart them, his career on the line should they uncover his connection to one of the women.

Burke is an accomplished writer, her storytelling skilful and fluid.

She has taken a 21st-century topic, deals with it in a way techno-dummies can still enjoy, and uses

it as the foundation of a tense and accomplished thriller.