Recent crime novels | 25 November 2009

Fever of the Bone (Little, Brown, £18.99) is the sixth novel in Val McDermid’s Jordan and Hill series.

Fever of the Bone (Little, Brown, £18.99) is the sixth novel in Val McDermid’s Jordan and Hill series. Someone is using a networking website to lure young teenagers, both boys and girls, to their deaths. Meanwhile Detective Chief Inspector Jordan is struggling with the demon drink, and also with a new boss, who questions both the cost-effectiveness of her unit and the nature of her personal and professional relationship with clinical psychologist Tony Hill. As for Hill, a father whom he never knew has just left him a posh house, a lot of money he doesn’t want and yet more doubts about his own self-esteem.

McDermid expertly blends her ingredients into a tense and often frightening crime novel. She writes incisively about the world we live in, ranging confidently from teenage technobabble to the politics of modern policing. Carol Jordan and Tony Hill are surely the most impressive double act in contemporary crime fiction. In the end this is, on many levels, a story about some of the toxic possibilities of the parent-child relationship.

David Hewson’s The Cemetery of Secrets (Pan, £6.99) is a revised edition of a novel published some years ago as Lucifer’s Shadow. Set in Venice, it is a standalone thriller whose story unfolds partly in the present and partly in 1733. The narrative opens with the ghoulish exhumation of a corpse and the theft of an antique violin. It spreads out to embrace a louche Oxford academic, glamorous musicians, Venetian lowlife, eccentric antique dealers, Vivaldi, Rousseau, the restrictions placed on Jews in the 18th century and much else.

There are some big themes here as well as a high bodycount and also a reassuring sense of solid research underlying the descriptions of Venice, past and present.