Recent crime fiction | 23 July 2011

John Lawton’s Inspector Troy series constantly surprises.

John Lawton’s Inspector Troy series constantly surprises. A Lily of the Field (Grove Press, £16.99), the seventh novel, has a plot stretching from Austria in 1934 to Wormwood Scrubs in 1949, via Los Alamos and Paris. Fiction rubs shoulders with fact. There are big themes — including the Holocaust, the atomic bomb and Cold War espionage — but they are linked to individual lives, beautifully and economically described.

Meret is a cellist whom we meet as a schoolgirl in prewar Vienna, and her career provides the thread that binds together the various strands of the novel. Like all the characters, she is caught up in a world changing beyond recognition; and, as their world changes, so do they. Loyalty collides with expedience; necessity with idealism. Music is constantly present in one form or another. The Auschwitz orchestra plays Bach’s Third Cello Suite for the cloth-eared commandant. A central European physicist is given a passport in the name of Charlie Parker. Troy himself, no ordinary policeman, moves in and out of the story.

In the hands of a lesser novelist, the grand historical backdrop, the wealth of characters and the numerous locations might have led to disaster. But Lawton writes with authority. His characters convince, and so does their world. Admirable, ambitious and haunting, this is the sort of thriller that defies categorisation. I look forward with enthusiasm to the next one.

Erin Kelly’s first thriller, The Poison Tree, was widely praised, with some reviewers comparing her work to that of Daphne du Maurier. Her second, The Sick Rose (Hodder & Stoughton, £14.99), is nearer in spirit to Ruth Rendell’s work. Its main setting is a restoration project reconstructing a Tudor garden in Warwickshire.