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Marquis, Max

Death of a Good Woman

London, Macmillan. 330 pp. £ 16.99.

Amongst the many challenges facing crime writers is why anyone should kill someone against whom nothing is known. Quiet church-going Mary Docker is found stabbed to death in her bed. Nobody seems to shed any adverse light on her discreet life.

A further wave of murders puts the local CID under immense strain. The sleuth is Detective Inspector Harry Timberlake, whose marriage is breaking down.

Timberlake is certain he knows the identity of the murderer, but there is no evidence. He realizes that the murderer must be led along to betray himself.

To get the suspect to do so Timberlake uses a textbook, "Police Interrogation" by Superintendent John Walkley M.Sc. The textbook tells you how to enhance the investigator's status. Colleagues are to address him with exaggerated respect. The suspect is placed on a chair, from which two inches have been sawed off the bottom. The suspect, who thinks the world of himself -- after all he's got away with murder -- is led in!

Enhancing Timberlake's status works, but not quite in the way he planned. His superiors weren't very happy with the bill that they got, but he got his man.

Max Marquis, a former FA County referee, lives in London and frequently holidays in France, where he lived for many years.

Marshall, William

To the End

New York, The Mysterious Press (Warner Bros.). 230 pp. $23.00.

This is the latest and amongst the best of the famed Yellowthread Street police station mysteries set in the mythical Hong Bay district of Hong Kong.

It is June 1, 1997, one month before the British return Hong Kong. Chester Cheng, a poor and pathetic janitor who never achieved his dream to be an actor is shot to death. But so is the man upstairs, an Australian-born detective who has spent his career hunting down the notorious Triads. His friend Harry Feiffer investigates the shooting. Then the detective's wife is also murdered. Detectives Spencer and Auden are called out to what they think is the abandoned castle of the Geomancer's Union (containing the passageway to hell, but they don't know it ... yet). In his office, Detective Senior Inspector Christopher O'Yee is waiting for the representative of the Chinese People's Republic to take over.

Harry Feiffer investigates by the book, but the picture simply does not come together. He cannot understand why the local Triads want him to find out who committed the murders. Detectives Spencer and Auden find themselves in a series of surrealistic situations, unable to comprehend whether their lives are in danger or they are being mocked. Detective Senior Inspector O'Yee discovers that the much feared representative of the People's Republic insists on being called Claude, quotes western poetry and films, and matches philosophical witticisms (western and eastern) quotation for quotation with him.

This is a picture of Hong Kong before the handover, when the westen mask must go. What is it like to be men, often of mixed race, often of foreign abstraction, who have no national or religious or ethnic or racial loyalties, whose only loyalty lies to themselves, to their friends and to truth and justice, and who cannot let go of such loyalties? Will their tiny place in their chaotic world be intact after the takeover?

And the mystery of the murders turns out not to be the greatest mystery in the book. The greatest mystery is the one buried in China's past, woven unobtrusively into the plot, and revealed right at the end. This being a Yellowthread mystery, the revelation is both grave and raucous simultaneously.

Will there be another Yellowthread mystery? Fortunately, Claude, the representative of the Chinese People's Republic realizes that the district can only be policed by lunatics such as O'Yee, Feiffer, Spencer and Auden, so however things will end up for Hong Kong, us crime buffs should be okay.

William Marshall is an Aussie and worked all over the world doing all sorts of things, including being a morgue attendant, and tutoring in an Irish prison. He now lives in Aussieland.

Masters, Priscilla

A Fatal Cut

London, Macmillan. 314 pp. £16.99.

"What are you suggesting? That one of our surgeons is making such a mess of his work he's reduced to dumping the body of his patient in clinical waste bags on a patch of ground at the back of the hospital?"

The serial murderer has exercised the minds of the public and crime writers have racted to it by writing more lurid but also cleverer and more insightful accounts of the pursuit. Moreover, writers such as Priscilla Masters have added their own medical expertise. As usual, the private lives of the police and the professionals and amateurs assisting them are part of the story, either getting in the way of the investigation or nudging it along. Can everyone get away from their past and make new lives?

One after another, dead bodies are found in the grounds of the hospital. The bizarre discovery made by the pathologist is that the bodies all have surgery wounds, but they have all been inflicted after death.

An absolutely obnoxious forensic psychiatrist is brought in and it is an intriguing part of the story whether his professional knowledge advances the investigation, or his obnoxiousness and unrelenting attempts to control people and events retard it and place more people in danger. A reading circle could have an insightful discussion into this. Or as to why the name of a painting on the investigating detective's wall is not revealed till the very last line of the book. I'll give it away. Magritte's Golconda. To your encyclopedias, crime buffs!

Priscilla Masters claims the medical staff in the book are not based on any she knows personally, and she a GP-attached nurse.

Masters, Priscilla

And None Shall Sleep

London, Macmillan. 234 pp. £16.99.

Jonathan Selkirk (ruthless solicitor) receives a letter suggesting he make a will. Was it an advertising gimmick or a warning? Hours later he has a heart attack and ends up in hospital, but not for long. That night he disappears. Has he "discharged" himself or has he been abducted?

Detective Inspector Joanna Piercy should have been given the case (after all she was in the same hospital following an accidental brush with a car), but the Regional Crime Squad is given the task instead. The Regional Crime Squad thinks big - this must be the work of a contract killer.

DI Piercey is torn. She would have liked to solve the case herself, but loyalty and a sense of duty demand she help Superintendent Karen Pugh (looks like one, too). She is also feeling guilty because Matthew claims he left wife and family for her. On the one hand she wishes to be free. On the other when she needs Matthew he suddenly remembers wife and family! The course of an affair seldom runs smoothly in a modern crime novel.

The evidence points not to a contract killer but to a family that may have taken justice into their own hands. This is where the reader will be torn. Only us Brits are raised to believe that ordinary folk may not take the law into their own hands but place our faith in the police and the hopeless criminal justice system.

And what happens to DI Piercey and her relationship with a married man?

Priscilla Masters comes from Yorkshire, works as a GP-attached nurse, has GP husband and two sons.

Masters Priscilla

Catch the Fallen Sparrow

London, Allison & Busby. 298 pp. £5.99.

The sleuths are Detective Inspector Joanna Piercy and her sergeant, Mike Korpanski. The burning corpse of a ten year-old is found, scarred by cigarette burns, the hands are tattooed, the clothes are scruffy, but the trainers are expensive. The gold ring on the corpse's left hand belonged to the local MP. But the local MP has been dead for over a year. After that grisly start, the end is equally grisly. In addition to the mystery of who killed the boy, there is also the mystery of who he was, who was the old woman watching the body burn, why was it left under an outcrop known as the Winking Man, on which nature carved a human face, and where are two more missing teenagers?

DI Joanna Piercy has to walk very carefully. She can establish motive, but not yet proof. All she has to do is make one mistake, and all the weight of the British defence system, which protects the innocent as much as the guilty, would come down on her like a ton of bricks. Can she preserve objectivity, or will the job get to her, as it would to any sensitive person?

She solves the case, all the loose ends are tied together, and she and we learn a little philosophy from the secret watcher, "It's the same world. We all has different ways of livin' in it, but it's the same world all right...There's things you knows, I dare say, but there's an awful lot of things you don't know."

One of seven adopted children, Priscilla Masters comes from Halifax and now lives in Stoke-on-Trent.

Masters, Priscilla

Scaring Crows

London, Macmillan. 297 pp. £16.99.

Aaron Summers and his son Jack, farming not too successfully, are gunned down. The body is discovered by the man keen to marry their daughter Ruthie, (an incredible creation by the author), but the feeling is not mutual. She has vanished. Had she murdered her father and brother, and run away from the claustrophobic atmosphere?

The sleuth is Detective Inspector Joanna Piercy. Joanna Piercy will not give up a promising career to be stuck with squalling brats. Her job does not leave time for bathing babies, changing nappies, shoving bottles down their throats in the middle of the night. The trouble is that she is in love with Dr. Matthew Levine, the forensic scientist she works with. He's left wife and daughter for her ... and now wants to settle down and have another family!

As the investigation proceeds, the answers only throw up more questions. Matthew (and his daughter) get more difficult and he cannot give her the emotional support she needs. The riddle of the alibi will make you laugh. The solution will break your heart.

Priscilla Masters, like so many others, in the words of another writer, Janet Laurence, chose the crime novel because it offers opportunities for exploring the human condition in a remarkable number of ways, from noir to comedy, from subtlety to the bludgeon. And write a good mystery!

McBain, Ed

Killer's Choice

London, Allison & Busby. 219 pp £5.99.

Events (dare I call a spade a spade and say murder) in the 87th Precinct may not be front-page news in its own locality, but for all us crime buffs and fans of the 87th Precinct it is good news, indeed.

Two deaths.

Annie Boone, pretty, red-headed, riddled with bullets, surrounded by broken bottles, lies face down on a liquor store floor. Why should anyone want to kill her?

Detective Roger Havilland lies face up in a grocery store window. A shard of glass has pierced his jugular. Why should anyone want to kill him?

Our old friend Carella (who sometimes manages to look as friendly as a cobra) has a new partner. The new partner is inexperienced but too keen, putting his own life and Carella's in danger. He then decides he must make up for it. And he does in a way that will send you gasping. All the regulars are here, Meyer Meyer, Kling. Children help solve the case by being themselves.

Another crime novel showing the police at its best, though it might upset those who believe in the sanctity of family life It will leave you wondering, who are the heroes and who are the villains, when one partner in a marriage goes philandering.

McGown, Jill

Picture of Innocence

London, Macmillan. 425 pp. £16.99.

Mrs. Bailey may be a wickedly attractive woman, but why does she take her husband's boots off when he snaps his fingers at her. And why does she put up with beatings from him without so much as a murmur? Is she the one who killed him? Well, just about everyone in the area seemed to have a motive for doing so.

DCI Lloyd and DI Judy Hill discover that Bernard Bailey's farm was protected by security devices and surveillance cameras, that he had refused to sell his land to an adjoining developer ... and that the wickedly attractive Mrs. Bailey had married him because he wanted a son to collect his inheritance and she wanted the rich life. She just wasn't getting pregnant and this resulted in more beatings as he suspected her of deliberately taking the pill.

This is a very clever book. We live in a world riven by communication, yet people hopelessly lose touch with each, and decades later friends and relatives find themselves living beside each other and unaware of having past connections. It is just this that the author uses for the solution, which also leads to Lloyd and Hill reconsidering their own relationship.

This is Jill McGown's thirteenth novel, ninth in the Lloyd and Hill series.

McGown, Jill

Plots and Errors
A Tragedy in Five Acts

London, Macmillan. 472 pp. £16.99.

Two sets of deaths, seemingly unrelated, are interwoven in this lengthy crime novel. which rests on a seemingly unbreakable alibi. The proprietors of an unsuccessful detective agency are found in a fume-filled car. To make life easy for themselves, the police think they are a double suicide. But if the pair were so unsuccessful, how come all that state-of-the-art computer equipment? Hmm! Then the matriarch of the Esterbrook family is shot dead. All the evidence points to her greedy and ambitious son, determined to ensure he gets the family business (nearly in the billion class). The son is also shot dead. Everyone but everyone has an alibi.

DI Judy Hill and her paramour Detective Chief Inspector Lloyd are the sleuths. DI Judy Hill is pregnant, Lloyd is the father, but she won't marry him. She loves him alright, but doesn't trust the way he manages, if ever so nicely, to manipulate everyone's emotions, including hers.

The book has little action, but much insight into the human condition. Were the Esterbrooks murdered for their money, or was there another motive. If there was, it would point to the killer. The plot unfolds slowly (with lots of quotations from Hamlet), and just as we think the mysteries have been resolved the rug is jerked from under us. Remember the suspected suicides?

Murder mystery and family relationships.

Jill McGown was born in Argyll and turned to writing full-time when she was made redundant by the British Steel Corporation.

Murphy, Margaret

Caging the Tiger

London, Macmillan. 261 pp. £16.99.

Dr. Helen Wilkinson had always fantasized about it, committed the deed so often in her head that when it actually happened, it came as a surprise. She came home one day to find her husband naked under the sheets. He looked calm. His eyes were shut. But he wasn't asleep. He was dead, and there was blood everywhere. She is the prime suspect. Her strong Jewish friend Ruth ("where there's life, there's uncertainty") gives her support throughout until nearly the end, when a second murder occurs and Helen Wilkinson is considered a suspect for that one too.

The book is set against the financial problems universities face. Cuts must be made. Who will lose their jobs? Who will keep their jobs? Professor Wilkinson, the murdered man, was a sadistic and manipulative man. He enjoyed humiliating people. In the atmosphere of departmental cuts he really enjoyed himself making them. As the police unravel the case, it wasn't just his wife who had a motive to murder him. Helen Wilkinson and the police realize who is the murderer within minutes of each other. Even though you might feel that Wilkinson got his.

Margaret Murphy heads a department specializing in teaching children with dyslexia.