A choice of crime novels | 21 January 2009

Ruth Rendell’s Kingsmarkham series is set against the changing backdrop of a provincial town over more than 40 years. But her London-based books, though they lack recurring characters and locations, almost amount to a series in their own right. She has made the city her own, and writes with both knowledge and compassion about its streets and buildings, its transport and its shops — and above all about its inhabitants.

Her latest novel, Portobello (Hutchinson, £18.99), is almost incidentally a crime story. The road of the title provides the spine of a narrative that shifts expertly between groups of characters in widely disparate social settings. An art dealer tries to conceal his pathetically plausible guilty secret from his GP fiancée. A rich man’s son, whom guilt has driven to the edge of madness, feels the siren call of death. An ineffectual young criminal is caught between his love for a girlfriend who has thrown him out and his dependence on a wicked old uncle of squalidly Dickensian eccentricity. When the art dealer finds a sum of money in the street, he puts up a notice to advertise his discovery. By doing so, he triggers a series of events that sets the characters whirling together towards an unexpected and entirely satisfying resolution. As ever, Rendell writes with wry and witty authority. This may not be a crime novel in the traditional sense, but don’t miss it on that account. It’s intelligent stuff, and very readable.

One of the pleasures of Frank Tallis’s Max Liebermann series is the setting — belle-époque Vienna. Darkness Rising (Century, £12.99) is the fourth installment. A monk is found decapitated, his head seemingly wrenched from his body. A councillor is murdered. The corpses are left beside churches.