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Page, Emma

Intent to Kill

London, Constanble. 174 pp. £16.99.

Lilian Anstey started in life very poor. She married twice, both times for security. She was a very good wife. When her first husband died, she used the money she inherited to help her second husband build up a successful business. She may not have loved her husbands but she cared after them.

Her second husband is diagnosed with a fatal illness. Is that why he deliberately took an overdose? Could his greedy niece, keen on the good life, have decided she couldn't wait any longer for her share of the inheritance? Or her layabout husband? What about the two accountants who had been milking the firm? (There is an irony here. The two crooked accountants ensure that they do not go on holiday at the same time, but one unexpectedly dies while the other is away and the whole can of worms opens up.) Then ten-year-old Billy Coleman is found dead, and this is murder. He had been to the Anstey home? What's the connection.

Emma Page writes perfect cosies, murder mysteries without blood and gore, involving many lives and a network of human emotions. Diverting, gratifying, readable, not entirely distracting the reader from real life. Long after you put the book down, you will not get either the twice-widowed Lilian Anstey or little Billy Coleman out of your thoughts.

Emma Page is twice-widowed, lives in Worcestershire in a house Elizabeth Barrett Browning visited and stayed in. Her spirit clearly lives on in Emma Page's novels.

Pearce, Michael

Dmitri and the One-Legged Lady

London, Collins Crime (HarperCollins). 170 pp. £16.99.

Meet Dmitri Kameron, a wily and determined lawyer of Scottish-Russian descent, Assistant Procurator in a dreamy province of tsarist Russia.

The One-Legged Lady is an icon. Nearly every home in Russia had one. The Church said that it was to remind you that you were forever under God's protection. Dmitri said that since this was Russia and Church and Tsar were hand in glove, it was to remind you that someone was always keeping an eye on you. It always reminded Dmitri of his difficult grandfather.

Who would want to steal an icon, especially the one known as the One-Legged Lady. Why are the peasants getting restless about the theft, accusing the monks, the Church, the government? And not the local peasants either, but the ones from Tula, whence the icon originally came. The local monks had bought it from Tula and were making a pretty kopeck out of it. The pilgrims were poor, but so many gave a kopeck or two each, the monks were doing nicely, following the old Russian precept that if everyone proffered a thread, the naked would have at least have a shirt).

There is a demo by the peasants. Tula is in the grip of famine and only the presence of the Holy Icon of the One-Legged Lady of Kursk can assuage it, and now the icon has gone missing. The middle and upper class ladies prepare parcels to send into the stricken area. Volkov of the Corps of Gendarmes of the Ministry of the Interior has brought in merciless Cossacks to put down what he sees as an uprising against authority.

In this tongue-in-cheek story, Russian spirituality preserves its spirituality, while the charitable ladies' donations come into use for other purposes. Even Cossacks find it difficult to mount a charge against a religious procession led by the Assistant Procurator, side by side with the governor's daughter ... not when there are material rewards on offer from the spiritual and the progressive.

The Holy Icon of the One-Legged Lady has been there all the time, of course. Only a wily Scot would know where to look. We even discover who she was, and what a story that is within the story!

Michael Pearce believes there was a brief period in the 1890s when democratic institutions and an independent legal system may have got off the ground in Russia. His Dmitri Kameron series is set in that period.

Pelecanos, George P.

King Suckerman

London, Serpent's Tail. 264 pp. £8.99.

Not for the squeamish.

Bobby Roy Clagget walks into the projection booth at the drive-in, knows when there will be shots on the screen, pulls a sawed-off Remington out of his pant leg and shoots the projectionist. The projectionist had failed to show him respect and in the films Bobby Roy Clagget watched, that was the punishment.

Wilton Cooper instinctively feels that anyone who has pulled this off must be a fellow film buff and decides the little brother needs a friend. Claggett recognizes Cooper's car (from the film Vanishing Point). They become buddies, movies and pop music become reference points throughout the book. Neither are emotionally capable of working. Both wish to have fun in life.

They set off for the Big City. People meet, cheat, fight, kill or pass each other (eyes averted to show fear or contempt, whichever). Tribes and families no longer count. There is just your buddy and you. They become drug dealers, involving themselves with equally minor drug dealers and crooks whose minds are filled with the same mythologies culled from films and pop music. Cars. Someone always rides shotgun, just like in the films. The characters know whether this is their film or not and act accordingly.

There is a scene when one of the crooks decides he must influence someone to get out of this life. He says, "Look ... what I really mean to say is, don't waste your time. You think you're just having fun and then ten years pass and you figure out that you haven't done a goddamn thing. All you've been is high, and you can't even remember what was so good about that." But the nineteen-year old he says this to isn't listening. He hears, but he doesn't listen. The next generation of petty crooks is ensured.

The Big City in which this takes place is ... Washington, D.C.

George P. Pelecanos lives in Washington.

Pelecanos, George P.

Nick's Trip

London, Serpent's Tail. 276 pp. £7.99. US $12.99.

Once upon a time (in America and elsewhere) young people smoked a little has, got high on it, but not too high, and thought the world was a dream. Then came cocaine and the dream became a nightmare. Pelecanos has set the Nick Stefanos (in worldly terms a not very succesful PI, working as a temporary barman) crime novels in the world of the nightmare. Nick smokes and drinks incessantly. Most people don't have enough sense to stay away from home, even when they outgrow it, but Nick had no choice. And so he does through life nostalgic for the years and times of his youth.

Out of the blue there appears his high school friend Billy Goodrich. They have been out of touch. Billy decided he'd make good. He didn't think Nick was the sort of friend that a successful man should carry along with him on the road to success. But he got into trouble and looked up Nick for help. His wife had walked out on him. Is he in love with her. No, because it's easy to confuse being in love with just loving the memory of a certain time. This is a sentiment Nick understands. Billy just wanted to know if she is alright, that's all, even if she decides not to return. Nick agrees to help.

Billy and Nick undertake a series of journeys in which they smoke and drink too much to find Billy's missing wife. Neither character appears too appealing. Nick is trying to hold on to his integrity, which is his saving grace. As regards Billy, he thinks the world isn't all good or all bad. It's somewhere in between. The ones who come out of it all right are the ones who pull both ways.

There is fascinating sub-plot, as Nick tries to discover who murdered his friend William Henry, and drollery as a lesbian friend asks him to father her child and he has to decide whether he feels he can do it. There is an unforgettable array of characters. We are kept guessing who are the goodies and who are the baddies. It is now known that the way people treat animals is often an indication of their character. With great subtlety this theme is woven into the narrative.

This is the second of the Nick Stefanos series. George P. Pelecanos lives in Washington D.C., which from the book may well stand for Dodge City.

Pieczenik, Steve

State of Emergency

New York, Putnam's. 300 pp. US $24.95.

The inside joke in the US State Department was that if anyone wanted to know whether a crisis was imminent, they only had to stake out the C Street entrance. What foods were delivered and how frequently was the key to unlocking the secrets of national security. Secretary of State Barbara Reynolds favoured North China cooking. The President and Vice-President are away and there is a crisis and the food from North China arrives by the van-load.

For us outsiders, the US looks like a happy country with a happy population (by and large), except for some minority groups. It is difficult for us to conceive that native-born Americans may be dissatisfied on such a massive scale, that they are prepared to secede! After all, there is a precedent, and the precedent of the Civil War is constantly held up before our eyes in this political mystery and adventure story. Little known to us outsiders is that in order to win the votes of environmentalists the federal government has been taking away lands out of which the states are no longer able to raise money from mining, shipping, grazing fees.

This federal government must stay out of citizens' bedrooms, pocketbooks, schools. Patriotic Americans decide they must stand up to the federal bureaucracy. And they do. The ambitious governors of four states sense they have enough paranoid public support to plan a military takeover of their own states.

Price, Robert T.

Nickers

London, Constable Crime. 172 pp. £16.99.

This unusual crime novel is set in Stratford-upon-Avon, but one tourists never get to see.

Kendall Madigan is a freelance car thief. He is good at his trade, but then he gets an offer with regular salary and expenses. Who can refuse that in difficult times? He doesn't. He becomes a salaried ,with bonuses, car nicker (and to think you thought the title referred to ladies' undies - for shame). He nicks a BMW on order and finds himself sucked into a bitter feud between rival criminal organisations ... and carrying on with two women. Lucky Ken. Or is he?

The array of villains is really something special. Robert Price has a fine eye for villainy, a fine ear for the argot of the criminal world (no longer an underworld, of course) and a fine nose for the real Stratford, which you will never see in the same light again. He passes it all to the reader in prose that will make you fall about laughing and wish you were in his shoes but only at the end, of course.

After early retirement Robert T. Price thought writing might be a good way to put off mowing the lawn. He is a Scot and lives in Stratford.)

Puckett, Andrew

Shadows Behind a Screen

London, Constable Crime. 191 pp. £16.99.

Before Harry Benedict came to work at Regis Microbiology Lab it was a happy place. Harry liked women and women liked Harry. He flaunted his affairs. He took up with the woman Richard Kelso, a colleague, loved and wished to marry and she died in a car accident. He had an affair with the wife of the boss. He is having an affair with ... it never seemed to stop. The administrative officer in charge is constantly being shown up by him.

Benedict's baby son is admitted to hospital and fails to respond to treatment. Someone tampered with the hospital computer which relays hospital results. The baby died. Benedict decides that Kelso is responsible and kills him. It looks like an open and shut case.

The authorities are not bothered so much by the murders as the fact that something may have gone wrong with the computer system. Tom Jones, a health inspector in the Department of Health is sent in to check the computer system but is drawn into the investigation. He discovers that the bad are not that bad and those who look as if they are good ...we all know that, but do we see it?

What he reveals solves the case, but what he reveals may mean you will never trust a computer (as if anyone does now) and will watch with much greater care the folk who use it with such aplomb and tell you it is all the faulty of the computer. Note the title.

Andrew Puckett was born in England's loveliest county, Dorset, and grew up on a farm. He was Microbiologist at the Blood Transfusion Center in Oxford.