September crime fiction: UK authors on the case

Crime fiction |

If London is still on your mind after the recent Olympic Games, here’s a selection of winning crime novels from the UK.

Harry Bingham’s “Talking to the Dead” (Delacorte, 352 pp., $26) is a stunner with precision plotting, an unusual setting, and a deeply complex protagonist.

Fiona Griffiths, a police detective in Cardiff, Wales, is blunt, defiantly blue collar, slightly unhinged, and with few social graces — but with great compassion for life’s victims. This emotion is front and center while investigating the murder of an addict and her daughter — especially when one detail is found at the squalid murder scene: a rich, dead man’s platinum credit card.

As Griffiths obsessively works the case, she tries hard to follow the rule book — really, she does — but cannot help following an eccentric path that her colleagues regard with bemusement, puzzlement, or outright hostility. Meanwhile, we get tantalizing hints of darkness in her past — something she calls her “illness.”

This secret is disclosed at the end of this breathtaking book, but the revelation isn’t a game-ender. We have the welcome promise of more books to come about Griffiths, a character who may well rise to the top ranks of fictional British detectives.

Quirke, the appropriately named Irish pathologist who haunts Benjamin Black’s novels, returns in “Vengeance” (Holt, 320 pp., $26). Wealthy businessman Victor Delahaye takes the reluctant son of his business partner on a sail, and while on the water Delahaye hauls out a pistol and fatally shoots himself.

The partners’ seriously dysfunctional families have been intertwined for decades, producing no shortage of resentments and grudges for Quirke and his policeman colleague to unravel. “Vengeance” treads familiar ground: one of Black’s enduring subjects concerns bad things that happen to privileged but nasty families.

As you’d expect from Booker Prize-winning novelist John Banville (here “hiding” as Black), the writing is gorgeous and sleek, 1950s Dublin is richly evoked, and Quirke is captivating — by turns dour and charming, and with an air about him that is catnip to women.

Mischa Hiller’s “Shake Off” (Mulholland, 288 pp., $24.99) is a contemplative espionage novel that uses the imminent demise of the Soviet Union as a backdrop.

The protagonist is an unusual hero: a Palestinian spy named Michel Khoury. Khoury is a Maronite Christian who was born in a refugee camp and recruited at an early age by the enigmatic Abu Leila, a Palestine Liberation Organization operative. Khoury’s current mission: finding a location for secret peace talks. Khoury’s also hiding a package that both sides desperately want.

Not everything about this book works. Khoury’s romance with a British woman, Helen, is never convincingly fleshed out, and his addiction to painkillers distracts and adds little to his character. Despite these flaws, the book is consistently intriguing, if only to see what Khoury learned about spy tradecraft from his trainers in the KGB.

OK, so I lied about this month’s all-England choice: here’s a plug for books that only occasionally touch down in the UK. Since his death in 1995, the masterful Ross Thomas’ novels have criminally gone out of print. Lucky for us, St. Martin’s Press is stepping up to the plate and reissuing them.

These reprints include “The Cold War Swap” and “The Fools in Town Are on Our Side.” They abundantly demonstrate that, though some details are outdated (smoking and carrying a concealed gun on airplanes!), Thomas’ novels (which gleefully jump among espionage, capers, political satires, and other genres) remain fresh, witty and original.