CRIME FILE:
Graeme Blundell - From: The Australian
August 07, 2010

Reviewed: Wait For Dark, In the Name of Honour, The Passage, The Killing Place 
 
Wait For Dark
By Scott Frost
Headline 343pp, $32.99

Scott Frost delivers another rapidly paced piece of commercial fiction in this, the fifth instalment in the acclaimed series featuring Alex Delillo, Pasadena supervisor of homicide and single mother. (How does Frost write them so quickly?) This time Delillo is chasing a killer who talks in riddles that point to possible homicides during an LA heatwave, the city in meltdown. Frost is a former television writer (Twin Peaks, The X Files) who tells his stories in a detailed, cinematic style; the atmosphere thickens with paranoia so ominously you can almost hear the soundtrack. His take on the LA procedural is starkly original, layering the hard-nosed formula with a nicely wrought sense of gothic melodrama. His prose is as crisp and attuned to detail as you would expect of a classy TV writer, and he gets LA just right.

In the Name of Honour
By Richard North Patterson
Macmillan 401pp, $32.99

A BIG murder mystery from a best-selling writer. This tightly plotted read is also a court-martial drama, a timely examination of the shortcomings of military justice, and a family saga involving the tangled histories of two army families. Patterson, a former trial lawyer, knows how to pack ideas into his novels. Traumatised Brian McCarran, recently returned from Iraq, shoots and kills his former commanding officer, Captain Joe D'Abruzzo, claiming that D'Abruzzo attacked him for supposedly interfering in his marriage. Army lawyer Paul Terry defends McCarran in the high-profile trial but many secrets must be unlocked, lies uncovered and allegiances broken as he does battle in the courtroom. Patterson's intricate plotting doesn't let go; his writing is nicely nuanced and often elegant.

The Passage
By Justin Cronin
Orion766pp, $35

I LOVED this huge book, part dystopian essay, vampire saga and military novel. There are echoes of John Steinbeck, Cormac McCarthy, Bram Stoker, Tom Clancy and Stephen King and it's simply unputdownable. A six-year-old girl called Amy is abandoned at the convent of the Sisters of Mercy; a military experiment goes disastrously wrong in the jungles of eastern Columbia; a group of convicted murderers is rounded up by the FBI as they wait for lethal injections; one of them, called Giles Babcock, has the same nightmare over and over. Soon a plague of vampires has changed the world and a new set of characters emerges with their own stories and the girl called Amy, radiating some inner power, is still wandering the viral-infected wastes of earth. Beautifully written, and a triumph.

The Killing Place
By Tess Gerritsen
Bantam 322pp, $32.95

GERRITSEN is the classiest writer of medical thrillers in a crowded field, a one-time physician with a first-hand knowledge of emergency and hospital rooms. This is the latest in her best-selling Maura Isles and Jane Rizzoli series and the most accomplished. Boston Medical Examiner Isles goes missing during a snowstorm, and is feared dead when an abandoned car is discovered with four badly burned bodies inside. Boston detective Rizzoli travels with her husband, FBI Agent Gabriel Dean, to identify Isles's remains, relying on local law enforcement while trying to track their friend's last movements, including a possible, uncharacteristic romantic liaison. Gerritsen keeps her plot moving, nothing extraneous, her characterisations neatly realised, the momentum compulsive.