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Clark, Mary Jane

Do You Promise Not to Tell

London, St. Martin's Press. 260 pp. $23.95.

Did someone bid six million dollars for a Fabergé or a Fauxbergé?

Several careers hang on the answer. That of the director of the auction house who authenticated it. That of Farrell Slater, who knew her days as a TV producer would soon be over. (There is a wonderful insider account of what determines the content of your evening news.) The FBI agent responsible for tracking down forged and stolen art treasures. Not just careers but lives hang in the balance. People with the loosest possible connection with the Fabergé Moon Egg die (the final killing is actually very funny) or miss death by little inches. With the bad guys out of the way, the reader's suspicions are slowly focused on the characters who are good guys and nice ladies ... and seemingly innocent. All the time, the question is raised, Fabergé or Fauxbergé?

The author does keep the main mysteries to the very end. Who bid? Who owns it (real or fake)?

Was the second last czar's gift to the czarina genuine? Yes. And no. Thus teases the author. What about our heroine and her job as a producer? She's a modern lass. An unsatisfactory career might be better'n a good marriage any time.

Would-be writers please note: 139 short chapters in 260 pages! Certainly an original way to keep up the pace.

Mary Jane Clark is a producer and writer of CBS news.

Cohen, Stuart

Invisible World

London & New York, HarperCollins. 340 pp. £15.99.

This is a mystery and adventure novel set mostly in hotel rooms and airports from South America to Inner Mongolia. All the pleasures and perils of travel are encapsulated in it. It has three unusual men at its heart, and it deals with textiles, antique textiles, and makes them exciting so that you understand why collectors will go to any length to acquire them.. No, not tailors or textile merchants, but collectors.

Andrew Mann, living the mundane life of a plumber trying to help his father out in his business, receives a surprise package from his friend Clayton Smith, just as he also receives a phone call to say his friend has killed himself and would he come to the funeral in Hong Kong. His friend, a jet-setting rolling stone who appears never to have gathered any moss, is somewhat like the mischievous monkey king of Eastern lore. His last gift to Andrew Mann includes the cryptic message, "I've always been your wild card. Play me."

Another friend is the ubiquitous Jeffrey Holt. Jeffrey Holt is always making up stories about himself to impress people, especially the ladies. When he finally gets caught up in his own stories and pays the price, one even feels sorry for him. Comes the realization that it isn't just to impress the ladies. He is like that, constantly reinventing himself. There is a very subtle contrast between the dead man, who constantly reinvented himself but was genuine, and Jeffrey Holt who was not.

Artists. Smugglers. Seductive enemies. Duplicitous friends. The portrayal of Chinese people and China rings true. Did the late Clayton Smith know who to trust and who not to trust? Come to think of it, is he really dead, this man who communicated with one person only, Andrew Mann, and only with cryptic postcards?

The book's mystery is locked in an everyday object. A piece of textile, not made of synthetic material. The glory of anything handmade is what you don't see, the age, the time of its creation, the stories and values attached to it. Textiles retain the dimension of all the lives that have passed through them. They are a crystallization of personal and cultural history. The rituals for which they are worn. All these constitute the invisible world beyond our immediate senses.

The mystery ends in Inner Mongolia, but the Oriental fragrance of the book and its ideas will be with you for a long, long time.

Stuart Cohen, an Alaskan, is a textile specialist. Most of the book was written in hotel rooms, trains and airplanes across South America and China. Now that he is a full-time writer, he is confined to a dingy office with a computer and no telephone. A writer's life is tough.

Cook, Robin

Toxin

London, Macmillan. 357 pp. £16.99

Dr. Kim Reggis is divorced but wants to be a good father to his only daughter. Where does one take one's daughter for a treat, but to a fast-food restaurant for burgers and fries. She dies horrifically of food poisoning.

He sets out to discover why and how. Why the sudden violence directed at him and his ex-wife? After all, on the surface it doesn't look like any more than bureaucratic indifference and questionable food-handling practices. The threats make them more determined. Are there bigger interests at stake who feel threatened by exposure? The slaughterhouse scene alone is enough to turn anyone into a vegetarian. The boardroom cover-up may stop you eating out anywhere but your nearest friendly neighborhood kiosk. TV is silent and sits on their findings. The police are after him too, waiting to arrest him at his own daughter's funeral.

A basic requirement for the pursuit of happiness is good health, which requires clean water and uncontaminated food. This is a good yarn, but has that magic extra: how modern science and technology have created new forms of contamination and how large-scale business interests protect the contamination.

Robin Cook comes from Florida. The book is dedicated to those families who have suffered from the scourge of E. coli 0157:H7 and other food-borne illnesses.

Cooper, Natasha

Creeping Ivy

London, Simon & Schuster. 342 pp. £15.99.

Charlotte is Antonia's only child - a small, confiding, funny four-year-old with a terrible temper, utterly defenseless and far too young to be adrift in London. When she disappears, the worst is feared. The police launch a full investigation. Her mother Antonia has a friend and relative called Trish, who is writing a book on abused children. Trish's thoughts and book are on whether it would have been better for a maltreated child to have been aborted? Were there some people who were so inadequate and perverse that they should never be allowed to have children? And if so, who should decide? The courts? Would there ever be enough court time. Trish's instincts are torn one way and her intellect in the opposite direction. But she feels impelled to enter the investigation as a private sleuth. Antonia's live-in lover was having an affair with the little girl's nanny (who had a difficult childhood). He was in deep financial trouble, involved in advertising which seems a world of fast or feast. The lovely and successful Antonia, mother of the missing child, receives a torrent of hate mail from those who think she should have stayed home, cooked the meals and raised the child (presumably on the munificence of social security). The tabloids attack her for neglecting her child. The real father of the child thought he had made a new life for himself, but was now in the limelight. Presence or absence of alibis don't seem to answer the problem.

The epigraph which subtlely introduces the theme of the book is: "As Creeping Ivy clings to wood or stone And hides the ruin that it feeds upon" (William Cowper) is apt enough. This is not a situation in which friends and relatives pull together. Friendships and families fall apart. The police become suspicious of Trish because of her research and the research material she has accumulated. Her private life becomes exposed.

This is a very subtle mystery novel. Our sympathies keep on changing. Our opinions of the characters shifts as the investigation proceeds. We notice how even the police are torn between their natural sympathy, what the police textbooks say and their own instincts. Is there such a thing as a police personality? Does the human spirit have to fit into it? Is there scope for development?

The ending will leave you breathless, especially as you realise the full extent to which successful people are experts at manipulating others.

Natasha Cooper is a pseudonym. Apart from being a successful writer, she reviews books and writes about publishing.

Cooper, Natasha

Fault Lines

London, Simon & Schuster. 346 pp. £16.99.

Kara Huggate is to be a star witness in a case of alleged abuse at a children's home. She fails to turn up. The police think that she is another victim of the serial rapist and killer who has never been caught. But there are pointers to the fact that this may be a copy killer and rapist. The sleuth is the brilliant and idealistic Trish Maguire, a barrister. Trish received a letter posted by Sara Huggate before she died, asking her to help over the unfair dismissal of a colleague, Blair Collons. Blair is obsessive, paranoid, unconvincing, but out of respect for the memory of her friend, Trish Maguire decides she must help him.

Natasha Cooper begins her books with some powerful emotion. In a previous book, Creeping Ivy, she dealt with a terrorised child's reaction to an all-powerful adult's control over her. Here the prologue and the ending are also violent: the helpless victim's terror. It is not violence for its own sake, but is part of a story dealing with the length to which people will go to protect their position in society and cover up (in this case local government) corruption.

Very much a contemporary crime novel, dealing with contemporary people, faced with contemporary problems, a police under pressure but determined to do its best and the heroine having a not always understanding lover.

Natasha Cooper is a Chairman of the Crime Writers Association.