Recent crime novels | 22 September 2007

David Peace’s astringent novels inhabit the borderland between genre and mainstream fiction. His work includes the Red Riding Quartet and GB84 (winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize). Like its predecessors, Tokyo Year Zero (Faber, £16.99) is precisely grounded in its historical context — in this case Tokyo in August 1946, a year on from the Japanese surrender. The first of a projected trilogy, the novel deals with the murder of two young geishas strangled with their own shawls. Detective Minami of the beleaguered Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department is assigned the investigation, a task he accepts with what proves to be well-founded reluctance. The Department itself is in crisis, its personnel living in fear of another purge by the occupying authorities.

Like the hot and noisy city around him, Minami himself is a man on the brink of ruin. He shares its corruption, its brutality and its despair: in Peace’s Tokyo, everyone is guilty. The book’s intensity derives partly from the unrelieved grimness of its subject-matter and partly from its staccato, first-person, present-tense narrative. Dark and relentless, Tokyo Year Zero is not for the faint-hearted but it’s a considerable achievement.

In Beneath the Bleeding (HarperCollins, £17.99), Val McDermid returns to the Yorkshire city of Bradfield, the professional stamping ground of her series characters DCI Carol Jordan and criminal profiler Dr Tony Hill. The novel opens explosively with an incident at a secure hospital that leaves one man dead and Hill with a shattered leg. The momentum doesn’t slacken: someone poisons Bradfield’s star footballer with ricin. A bomb rips into the crowd at the football stadium, causing carnage. Jordan’s life is complicated still more by the arrival of a squad of heavy-handed intelligence officers, convinced that the bomb is the work of terrorists. Hill’s attempts to help from his hospital bed are marred when he is reunited with the mother from hell.