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Kalberer, Roderick

Lethal

London, Coronet. 293 pp. £5.99.

A mega-rich businessman is kidnapped in Spain. Leon "Trotsky" Garrick is sent to negotiate his release. Inspector Suarez enters to ensure no such negotiations take place, as it is against Spanish law. The businessman's daughter employs Garrick to find out who killed her husband. At first Suarez and Garrick are pitted against each other, but then, as Kipling's poem has it, when two strong men come face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth, there are no differences in border nor birth. They become allies.

Why are the Americans interfering with the investigation? Because they are developing a racially targeted (through genes) virus and have been experimenting with it, using Basques.

Every good book is like an onion. Layer after layer is peeled, till the heart of the onion lies revealed. Violence or educating the masses? Is an institution like the Guggenheim Museum a "good thing". Our elected leaders often know little of what goes on. Near them are the men who wield power. There is a heartbreaking scene in which a top American soldier decides a civilian plane must be eliminated to hide his secrets. There is a hilarious scene in which the President of the US is reading off an autocue. He cannot remember having authorised the speech. He doesn't know what the next line is going to say. Too late to stop. Never mind, damage limitation afterwards.

Roderick Kalberer, a yachtsman, was born in Lagos, Nigeria and lives in England.

Kelly, Nora

Old Wounds

London, Collins Crime, HarperCollins. 266 pages. £15.99.

The sleuth is Gillian Adams, a historian. She is coming home for her sabbatical to care for her aged mother. Her childhood home is near a sleepy college. Will it escape the violence of big cities. Evidently not. The body of a young female student is discovered on a lonely stretch of road. The police investigation that the girl had been leading a bizarre double life to work her way through college. (Reading this book you may decide that higher education ought to be free after all. Or at least there ought to be more scholarships and stipends.)

Gillian Adams meets up with her childhood friends. Little by little she is drawn into the investigation. Her boyfriend (a British detective) arrives because he misses her so much and helps her. One of her childhood friends is possibly the killer. She has to comprehend the complexity of their characters as adults, when she has only known them when they were all youthful.

This is a very good mysteries. The extra is the emotions that are roused in Gillian Adams when she comes home. How will she get on with her mother, now that she is a successful career woman? Old friends who have stayed behind? The ending is unusual. Gillian Adams decides she would rather write than lecture, rather live with her boyfriend than carry on a transatlantic affair. The planting and revelation of clues is traditional. The character interplay very modern, making the title particularly apt.

Nora Kelly, an American, teaches part-time and writes. We are told she divides her time between Cambridge and Vancouver and since there are two each of those, her whereabouts may be a mystery.

Kennedy, Douglas

The Job

New York, Hyperion. 387 pp. US $23.95.

Ned Allen is a poor boy made good. The streets of New York proved to be paved of gold and he (and his adored wife Lizzie) are getting their fair share of the gold dust. Ned sells advertising space for a computer magazine. All salesmanship is storytelling and he is good at telling stories. He loves to sell, loves hearing the client say "yes". That's what life is all about, getting everyone around him to say "yes".

A few decisions Ned doesn't think are important and people start saying "no". The downward spiral begins. He is ready to grasp at anything. Nothing works. When he has hit rock-bottom, a school friend turns up with the offer of a job. Would Ned like to sell for the legendary Jack Ballantine, who writes "How to ..." books which sell by the million. Ned doesn't have to promote the books, but he does read them and quotes them when the time comes to turn the tables. Ballantine wants to cash in on his fame as an American business guru and start selling shares. Ned is pitchforked into the world of off-shore banking, where you can actually tell the US government to go to hell, and where bankers are like priests, who cannot reveal anything to anyone but cannot grant absolution for sins.

The writing is exceptional. The picture of New York, part heaven and part hell is exceptional. The characterization of New Yorkers is exceptional. The clash between marriage (American wives are clearly not as ready to be put upon as English wives) and career amongst the successful is exceptional.The danger of cellphones is marked in scene after scene. Human tragedy is reduced to a snappy sound bite on TV. The murder is saved up for the end, and you will be kept wandering, who gets murdered?

Watch out for the poignant scene when Kaddish is said over the mortal remains of the unsuccessful Ivan Dolinsky. Other than sheer entertainment, it is one of many poignant things the book has to say.

Unsurprisingly, Douglas Kennedy, born in Manhattan, lives in more heavenly London.

King, Laurie R.

A Monstrous Regiment of Women

London, Collins Crime, HarperCollins. 326 pp. £15.99.

An incredible sleuth!

Christmas 1920. Mary Russell, on the eve of her coming of age, when she inherits, is looking for respite from her Jewish aunt. Her aunt is strictly speaking Jewish but celebrates Christmas (which is no longer a Christian holiday as many of us know). Mary likes to dress like a man (often in her father's clothes). She is an authority on early rabbinic Judaism and interested in why it was so anti-female. She is also a considerable authority on the Bible: "Interpreting the Bible without training is a bit like finding a specific address in a foreign city with neither map nor knowledge of the language. You might stumble across the right answer, but in the meantime you've put yourself at the mercy of every ignoramus in town, with no way of telling the savant from the fool. Finding your way through the English Bible, you're entirely under the tyranny of the translators ... blatant mistranslations, and deliberate obliteration of the original meaning."

Mary Russell is introduced to the charismatic leader of a sect involved in the post-World War One suffrage movement but with a feminist slant on Christianity. Told that women must be silent in church, she preached the following: "Why does he want me to keep silent in church? What would be so terrible in letting me, a woman talk? What does he imagine I might say? ... What is this man afraid of? ... Can he imagine that ...". She amuses, entertains, educates, enlightens her audience mostly of women who have played their role in the war and refuse to be considered secondrate citizens." Why does she ask Mary Russell to be her mentor?

A series of murders claims members of the movements wealthy young female volunteers and rich contributors. Mary Russell investigates and what an insightful this young woman turns out to be as she goes among the sect members and begins to become familiar with their problems. And with this all, the book is a feast in Bible interpretation. Those of us who love the King James Bible will never be able to look at it in the same light again.

You may wonder how one so young can be such a splendid sleuth. The answer is that she has a tutor. Not far from her there lives the most famous private eye in history, nearly retired, still wishing to keep his hand in, his friend the doctor still on call, still looked after by the faithful Mrs. Hudson, and he tutors and helps Mary Russell in her sleuthing. Haven't you guessed who it is. Sherlock Holmes.

Laurie King is a third-generation San Franciscan. Her first novel, A Grave Talent, won the John Creasey for best first in the UK and the equivalent US Edgar. This is one of the best crime novels I have ever read. It has that magic EXTRA.

King, Laurie R.

O Jerusalem

New York, Bantam Books. 367 pp. $23.95.

During the final week of December 1918, shortly before her nineteenth birthday, Mary Russell vanished into British-occupied Palestine. She was accompanied by her friend and mentor, Sherlock Holmes.

At this point the fantasy stops, because this is one of the great novels about Palestine, realistic and subtle in its portraiture of the land, its inhabitants and languages. The Bedu are here. The Arabs. The Jewish pioneers. The Christians. The bazaars. The monasteries. Breath-taking descriptions of the land. Allenby had conducted a campaign of genius. Now the British were trying to hold on to it all. Comes the attempt to reduce Jerusalem's most sacred place to rubble and Allenby with it. The Brits know that something is up, but what?

Through the people and events move Sherlock Holmes and Mary Russell, who knows Hebrew and is now trying not only to learn Arabic, but how Arabic is used! There is a traitor, of course, and his identity will leave you gasping. By the time the long trail and the exciting chase is over, you'll swear the story was as true as the portrait of the land and its inhabitants.

Insightful mystery and suspense.

Laurie R. King has been chronicling the life and adventures of Mary Russell of which this is the fifth. Buy half a dozen copies. They will be first edition rarities.

King, Laurie R.

The Birth of a New Moon

London, HarperCollins. 445 pp. £15.99.

Cults. As the millennium draws to a close, we must be prepared for a sudden rise in the popularity of apocalyptic teaching. Because of the dangers they pose to themselves and others, it is necessary to understand and communicate with cultists.

In investigating the legality of a cult community, the key element is information, accurately obtained and accurately interpreted. We have all seen the tragedies that occur when law enforcement personnel simply do not share a common language with a group of believers. The only choice is ... . Thus Professor Anne Waverley.

Eighteen years ago, Anne Waverley's seven-year-old daughter and thirty-one-year-old husband died in a mass suicide. Since then she had become a lecturer to the FBI Cult Response Team, a professor of new religious movements, and occasional participant in FBI investigations.

In this book she is asked to look at a cult called Change, headed by two ostensibly level-headed men from levelheaded disciplines. The FBI file did not show any mild imbalance which might lead to a doomsday scenario. Yet Glen McCarthy, the FBI expert on cult behavior, is concerned. Anne is a bit fed up with him, but because of her past, feels she cannot refuse his request for her involvement.

This is an utterly fascinating book, and an intellectual treat. Interspersed between the chapters are excerpts from transcripts of Dr. Waverley's lectures. Section headings are from Sir George Ripley's The Compound of Alchymie (1652, but modernized). What characters! What a story for the end of the millennium!

Laurie R. King is a San Franciscan. Her deep understanding of religion and its effects comes through in her superb crime novels.