In the mind of a killer
Crime fiction reviews: Graeme Blundell writing in The Australian

Reviewed: Deeper Than the Dead, The Man from Beijing, Torn Apart, Beyond Reach

Deeper Than the Dead
By Tammy Hoag
Orion 421pp, A$32.99

BEST-SELLING Hoag is the queen of multi-layered, parallel-plotted thrillers with an arresting sense of character and motivation. Her 16th novel uses 1985 as backdrop for a riveting story of a sadistic, small-town killer and a group of fifth-graders, their teacher and their parents. The complex ties that bind the families are tested as the murderer becomes more active after the children discover a woman's body in the woods behind their school. Secrets spill out and a community's innocence is lost. Mobile phones are the size of bricks, real women wear shoulder pads and lust after Don Johnson, and DNA seems like a myth. Hoag's hero, the damaged Vince Leone, has to unlock the mind of the killer using the fledgling technique of profiling. Clever and compelling.

* * *
The Man from Beijing
By Henning Mankell
Harvill Secker 369pp, A$34.95

THIS is an epic stand-alone thriller from the best-selling author of the Kurt Wallander Scandinavian mystery series and it's just as engrossing. Judge Birgitta Roslin reads about the massacre of 19 people in a sleepy hamlet in Sweden's north, fascinated by the only clues - a red ribbon and a 19th-century diary - found at the scene. Shocked, she realises that her grandparents are among the victims. Duty-bound to quietly investigate, she quickly finds herself at the centre of an international web of corruption stretching from modern-day Beijing to Zimbabwe and Mozambique and finally to London's Chinatown. An unputdownable detective story as well as a political thriller that examines Chinese neo-colonialism in Africa, this is crime writing at its best.

* * *
Torn Apart
By Peter Corris
Allen & Unwin 211pp, A$29.99

AFTER the death of Lily Truscott, his partner of several years, a heart attack and bypass surgery and a near fatal bullet wound, former Sydney private eye Cliff Hardy is still going strong, as is his author. Corris's mastery of setting and social context is still so understated, it features almost as subtext as he drives another compelling mystery through to its unexpected ending. Hardy has inherited money from Lily but his life is complicated when his Irish cousin, Patrick, moves into his spare room and then is gunned down. Hardy is soon deep in a plot involving mercenaries, an Australian intelligence agency and Patrick's former wife. Corris is very good, bringing crime fiction back to simple facts and painful themes that churn beneath bland surfaces.

* * *
Beyond Reach
By Graham Hurley
Orion 344pp, A$32.99

NO one writes more authentic-seeming police novels than Graham Hurley, who almost obsessively documents the way justice always comes behind the politics of law and order. Tenth in the Portsmouth series featuring Detective Inspector Joe Faraday and former cop Paul Winter, who is now working for the city's drug lord Bazza Mackenzie, Beyond Reach starts with a seemingly open-and-shut hit-and-run murder. But quickly this death of one of the nastiest of the youths terrorising the Portsdown housing estate turns into a complex puzzle. No one intertwines parallel plots with more ingenuity than Hurley, or more surprises, or portrays the reality of social life in contemporary Britain with such depressing accuracy.