Crime Fiction by Barry Forshaw

Author:Barry Forshaw
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780857303363
Publisher: Oldcastle Books
Published: 2020-01-07T16:00:00+00:00

Deviant Ways (2000)

CHRIS MOONEY

While Mooney’s persuasive and edgy thriller may recycle familiar elements from the overcrowded serial killer genre, it largely does so with imagination and invention. After all, there are now so many dogged cops with fragile private lives stalking (and being stalked by) grimly ingenious psychotics, it’s impossible to avoid certain ideas popping up again and again. The real question remains: can an author make the material seem fresh? Largely speaking, Mooney pulls off the trick with real panache, and his troubled ex-FBI profiler hero Jack Casey is a very plausible protagonist, even if his struggle with a life shattered by an earlier encounter with a psychopath is one we know well from many another thriller. His nemesis is the Sandman, a terrifyingly prescient madman who is slaughtering not just one individual at a time but whole families and whole neighbourhoods. His method is explosives (shades of the Oklahoma bombings), and he knows quite as much about Jack Casey as he does about his well-researched victims – and particularly how to really twist the knife in his opponent. Mooney kicks off with a joltingly orchestrated prelude, and the simmering threat of appalling violence keeps the reader transfixed throughout. Unless you’ve a serious case of serial killer fatigue, this may be one for the shopping list.

The Rottweiler (2003)

RUTH RENDELL

Ruth Rendell turned out a body of work notable for both teasing ingenuity and seamless literary style. She is the British writer who is closest to her American predecessor Patricia Highsmith in dealing with the darker corners of human psychology, and that’s very much the case here. London is at the mercy of a vicious serial killer, dubbed the Rottweiler after bite marks are found on the neck of his first victim. When a second murder takes place near an antique shop, the narrative focuses on the owner of the store, Inez Ferry, and her neighbours, a rich gallery of character portraits. Inez herself is wasting her life, forlornly watching videos of her dead actor husband, while the Asian woman who works for her, Zeinab, enjoys an active sex life, having liaisons with two separate men while living with a third. Then there is the solitary Jeremy, while Will, a boy with learning difficulties, lives in an unhealthy relationship with his aunt. But this is not standard whodunnit territory, with a hidden killer and stubborn detective; as before in Rendell, the mystery is almost casually thrown away with the killer’s identity dispensed relatively early. What concerns her is the insidious progress of evil in the human soul; PD James may have been the writer with the more religious sensibility, but Rendell has the bleaker vision, with the murderous possibilities of human behaviour given full rein in her dark world. A blackmailer, too, is stirred into this heady brew, and this character is a mirror image of both the killer’s evil and the less savoury aspects of the other protagonists. With the minutely observed portraits of Inez and her neighbours counterpointed by the horror of a seemingly psychopathic killer, we’re in safe hands with Rendell.

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