Poisoned Mind (Simon & Schuster, £17.99) is the ninth novel in Natasha Cooper’s consistently impressive Trish Maguire series. Maguire has travelled a long and difficult road, both professionally and personally. She has just become a QC, but life hasn’t got any easier. Her first case involves representing a multinational waste-management company which is being sued by the widow of a struggling Northumbrian farmer, killed in an apparently accidental explosion. Maguire comes to suspect that the ecological pressure group supporting the widow has less than pure motives. Meanwhile her relationships with her solicitor partner and her step-brother are going through an equally sticky patch. Poison and its ramifications permeate the novel at every level. This is an assured performance that shows Cooper at her best.
Frances Fyfield’s latest novel, Blood From Stone (Sphere, £19.99), cuts another path through her trademark territory, the murky world of criminal law. Marianne Shearer, another QC but far more ruthless, puts on her favourite clothes and jumps to her death from a hotel balcony. Why? In her last case she successfully defended a psychopath against all the odds. She has just paid £1 million for a flat. Oddly enough, though, her legal representatives can’t find her will -— or her mobile, or her laptop or the majority of her personal possessions. And the psychopath is concerned that somewhere among her papers is evidence that could still destroy him. Fyfield’s complex and beautifully constructed narrative unpicks the truths that the dead woman concealed in life, and in doing so takes a sideways look at the sometimes flawed processes of criminal justice. As a bonus, she gives her readers much unexpectedly fascinating information about commercial self-storage units and the collection of vintage designer clothes. The novel has a haunting, slightly surreal quality, as so many of Fyfield’s do, and it is all the better for it.
Finally, an honourable mention for Death in Breslau by Marek Krajewski (Quercus/MacLehose Press, £15.99), the first instalment of a tetralogy set in what is now the Polish city of Wroclaw. In 1933, it was one of Prussia’s leading cities. Kriminaldirektor Eberhard Mock is called away from his weekly dalliance with two chess-playing prostitutes by the rape and murder of a baron’s daughter, found with her lady’s maid, also murdered, on a train. In another macabre touch, the compartment and the corpses are crawling with scorpions. To complicate matters still further, the Nazis are tightening their grip, and the Gestapo have an interest in the activities of the criminal police. Sinister and often bizarre, this is not a crime novel for the faint-hearted but it’s one to relish, not least for the setting.
Andrew Taylor’s latest novel, Bleeding Heart Square, will be published by Michael Joseph in May.
www.andrew-taylor.co.uk
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