Recent crime fiction | 18 October 2012

Like mists and mellow fruitfulness, Val McDermid novels often arrive in autumn. The Vanishing Point (Little, Brown, £16.99) is a standalone thriller whose central character, Stephanie Harker, is a ghost writer who compiles the autographies of celebrities. Her relationship with Scarlett Higgins, a foul-mouthed reality TV star known to the nation as the Scarlett Harlot, begins on a professional level but soon lurches towards the personal.

The novel opens after Scarlett’s death from cancer. Stephanie, now the guardian of Scarlett’s five-year-old son Jimmy, is held up by security at O’Hare Airport, Chicago.  A kidnapper walks off with Jimmy and vanishes into the blue. The story develops into a double narrative: events in the present are intercut with Stephanie’s first-person narrative describing her five-and-a-half year relationship with Scarlett which has brought her and Jimmy to this point. Towards the end the strands come together and lead to an eye-blinkingly effective climax.

In this intelligent and hypnotically readable thriller, what really interests McDermid, and us, is the meaning of fame and how people deal with being famous. The relationship between Scarlett and Stephanie is one of the best things she has done. True, the double narrative is sometimes cumbersome and a large red herring stinks to high heaven; but these add up to a small price to pay for this entertaining and thought-provoking book. Roll on next autumn.

It’s not easy to bring something new to the private-eye novel but Declan Burke rises to the challenge with panache in Slaughter’s Hound (Liberties Press, £11.99). Set in Sligo, this is the second novel to feature Harry Rigby, taxi driver and private investigator. His friend Finn Hamilton, heir to a diminishing property fortune, plunges nine storeys to his death before his eyes. For the police, Harry himself, a man of unorthodox methods and habits, is the obvious suspect — the eponymous slaughter’s hound.