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Gorman, Ed

A Cry of Shadows

London, Allison & Busby. 224 pp. £5.99.

The Avanti is the sort of chic restaurant where BMWs just naturally go of their own volition and you and I couldn't pronounce more than three items on the menu. Everybody there had too many lovers and too little peace. A stone's throw from the Avanti is a Catholic shelter for the poor and homeless. The men from the shelter bother the Avanti's clients, so the owners maintain bouncers to keep them away. You would think that other than that there is no connection between the two establishments, but there is, there is!

One of the Avanti's owners is killed, then a salesman from a factory. The police are puzzled.

Are the deaths connected? Jack Dwyer finds a third corpse.

The private eye is Jack Dwyer, an ex-cop, still retaining his idealism, learning to deal with the alienation of rich and poor. Gorman doesn't tell us where the action takes place. Once upon a time, it could only have been America, today we are all America. Jack Dwyer, a Catholic by upbringing (there is a hilarious account of how at school he was taught to dance sedately by a nun) philosophises about life and people as he threads his way through the violence that he knows diminishes even the spectator.

For those of us who like the hard-nosed American PI novel.

Ed Gorman comes from Iowa, where he was born, studied and lives.

Grafton, Sue

N is for Noose

New York, A Marian Wood Book from Henry Holt & Co. 248 pp. No price stated.

Tom Newquist had been a detective in the Nota Lake sheriff's office. He was a tough, honest cop, respected by everyone. He was overweight, smoked too much, worked too hard. Nobody was surprised when he was found dead in his car by the roadside.

As much as Tom Newquist was popular, his widow Selma was unpopular. She was the eternal do-gooder. Selma was bothered by the fact that in the last six weeks of his life Tom had been bothered by something. He didn't sleep. He brooded.

So she employed PI Kinsey Millhone to find out what it was that had bothered her late husband. Kinsey, despite not being the world's greatest housekeeper or office organizer, is thorough where her work is concerned. Only a writer of Grafton's ability could keep us interested as Kinsey explores dead ends. And at every dead end, everyone tells her that she is wasting her time (and Selma's money), because this is Selma at her busybody worst. The trouble was that someone tried to kill Kinsey, or at least put her out of action, and Kinsey is a very stubborn person. Whatever reservations she had about whether there was a case, she wanted to know who was after her.

Old murders that were left unsolved are solved. The reason for Tom's disquiet emerge (he was a good guy, and he was caught between being good and being truthful which may have caused his heart attack). In the end, as Kinsey's life is threatened yet again, a mother has to decide how far she can go to protect a guilty son. Should the past have been left alone?

The alphabet mysteries were launched in 1982 with A is for Alibi. At the rate of a book a year, we have something to look forward to for many years to come.

Grafton, Sue

O is for Outlaw

London, Macmillan. 351 pp. £9.99.

Three cheers! A new Sue Grafton in her alphabet murder series, featuring PI Kinsey Millhone.

Kinsey comes across a stack of cardboard boxes left in storage by someone somewhere containing memorabilia from her disastrous first marriage. Amongst them is an undelivered letter. Rereading the letter she realizes that she may have done that first husband an injustice. She had thought he was a dishonorable man and he may not have been. Others had thought he may have killed someone, but had he? Thus begins the latest and the most intriguing of the Kinsey Millhone series.

Kinsey Millhone is one of the most interesting creations in contemporary crime fiction. She defies authority, flaunts convention, even ignores ordinary standards of modern decency. She lies through her teeth, eavesdrops, picks locks, breaks into other people's houses, snoops through their possessions. If the bad guys don't play by the rules, why should she? And yet she is a true law-and-order type, outraged at those who violate the doctrines of honesty and fair play. Now it looks as if she hasn't treated that first husband fairly and he is in hospital at death's door.

For his sake and for her own she resolves to find out what happened, putting her own life on the line. In doing so she has to dredge up everything she remembers about her ex, the good things and the bad, because his character lies at the bottom of the mystery.
Unputdownable.

Simultaneously Pan are releasing N is for Noose at £5.99.

Granger, Ann

Keeping Bad Company

London, Hodder Headline. 311 pp. £5.99.

Just thinking about being tied to anything (or even anyone) fills Fran Varady, 21, with strong negative emotions, in other words, scares her witless. Her boyfriend Ganesh is the exact opposite. His dream is that he and Fran should go into business somewhere. His dream is her nightmare.

Fran has no family, no job, owns nothing. She sees what people pay for giving up their independence, so that her own independence means more and more to her. She admits to making mistakes, and doesn't learn from them. This is her philosophy, "Listen chums, we make the sort of mistakes we make because we're the kind of people we are. We're poor judges of character, or easily influenced, too kind-hearted for our own good or just plain lazy. So we go on making the same mistakes over and over again. I suppose you could say that in the end it gets to be a habit, a way of life."

A down-and-out herself, her dream of being an actress on hold, she buys a coffee for another down-and-out named Albie. Albie tells her of a violent abduction he had witnessed. She reports it to the police who dismiss it as the product of Albie's alcoholic hallucinations. The police warn her off, which gets her dander up. Tell her not to do something and Fran has to do it.

Albie is murdered.

The investigation is plagued by the fact that on the surface the abducted girl comes from a happy family. Why, they even picked her a husband-to-be. In the end it is Ganesh, Fran's boyfriend, who gets it right, "But I do know that when something's really badly wrong in a family, you often find that every member of it swears blind everything is just fine. You read it in the papers every day. Women married to murderers swear the bloke was a perfect husband and father. Families, no one understands them, only the family members."

Fran finds the missing girl and you may well wonder why the missing girl did what she did in the end.

Granger, Ann

Running Scared

London, HeadlineBooks. 310 pp. £16.99.

Ann Granger's Fran Varady mystery novels were fueled by an argument she had about the homeless. She wanted to present the jobless and homeless in a positive light. Fran Varady, in her own words, is awkward, obstinate and bloody-minded. But she has a sense of mercy towards street people, which drives her to help them and expose those who treat them as nothing. She understands them. As far as she is concerned, each one of us is an island. One must understand the island without trampling all over it. She has a friend called Ganesh. They are not lovers. They are friends. Friends are thin on the ground when you're down and out. Ganesh had always been a friend.

Fran, with her hair shaved off at the sides, a short brush top, a thin layer at the nape of the neck, claims she does not go out of her way to find trouble. She wants to be an actress, but often finds herself to be an informal inquiry agent. A dead body is found on her doorstep. If there is anything you can be certain of in this life, she says, it's that you never know what life's going to hit you with next. She discovers, to her indignation, that the police are using her and her friend Ganesh as decoys to lure a dangerous criminal. The police do not seem to be getting anywhere. Her friend Tig is raped, and wants to return home but there are times when the streets are better than her bullying father for whom the image of success is all.

Conventional situations are freshly-minted. All life is in this particular mystery novel. The jobless. The homeless. The small shopkeeper struggling to survive. The men who think it okay to gangrape a prostitute. The families of runaway teenagers. (Fran once had a family, and how she understands them). Those with ambition fulfilled and unfulfilled. Policemen intent on closing a case regardless. The grasping relatives and the men repairing the shop bathroom, all woven into the plots, may even make you laugh aloud. The ending will hit you in the solar plexus.

Ann Granger wrote sixteen historical novels as Ann Hulme, before she too turned to crime. She is also the author of the Meredith Mitchell novels.