On the way from Hope to Despair

The drifter is a staple of American fiction. He (the drifter is usually male) has his roots in the Western, but when Dashiell Hammett wrote Red Harvest, this picaresque character moved into the crime genre. (Although he snapped back again when Leone turned Hammett's novel into A Fistful of Dollars.) David Morrell gave the character an update and Vietnam-vet cred when he introduced John Rambo in First Blood. And now Lee Child - a British author doing rather well Over There - has given it an extra spin by having his ex-military cop Jack Reacher drift across America getting into all kinds of trouble.

Reacher has grown on me. At first I didn't like the fact that he didn't share the troubles of most male crime characters, but now I find it refreshing that he's built like a brick outhouse and is rarely plagued by doubt. In Nothing to Lose (Bantam £17.99, pp432), Reacher - carrying only a toothbrush, a credit card and a passport - is in the town of Hope, Colorado. He walks the 12 miles to the town of Despair (nice) for a cup of coffee; instead, he gets four redneck deputies, a vagrancy charge and a lift back to the town line. Now Reacher doesn't like being told what to do. He's also curious. And well he might be, since he's being kept out of town for big reasons. Cue a high-testosterone adventure with a thoughtful nod to what is going on in Iraq. Child's 12th novel is intelligent but the author never forgets that he's writing a page-turner. Thrilling.

Frances Fyfield is all about psychological exploration. Shocking, too. Her new novel, Blood From Stone (Sphere £12.99/£19.99, pp327), pretty much opens with a man cutting a woman's finger off at the kitchen table: 'The blood went in the soup and salt went in the wound.' Blood From Stone has all the complexity you'd expect from this award-winning grande dame of crime fiction (she's up there with Rendell, James, McDermid and Walters) and a fascinating cast of characters. They're all off-kilter, of course - one of Fyfield's pleasurable trademarks. The main character is the spiky sister of the woman who lost the finger (and, later, her life). She teams up with a quirky male lawyer who, unusually, retains a belief in justice. Together they try to nail the man who did it (a murdering, raping con man) by investigating the suicide of the high-flying, cold-as-the-Arctic barrister who got the sadist off. You learn more about frocks and sewing than you might want to while Fyfield meanders around her characters, but she is always quietly moving the plot along. The result is simply terrific.

Jane Hill's Can't Let Go (Heinemann £10.99, pp400,) shows a writer on the way up, though I was a bit bemused by the publicity material that accompanied her third novel. Useful to know she's a stand-up comic - there's a lot about the comedy scene in the novel - but less useful to know that Grazia declared her to be 'one of the world's sexiest spinsters'. I'm sure she is, but can she write good crime fiction? Well, Can't Let Go has an interesting premise - a woman who has got away with murder in America is now being stalked for the crime in Britain. Like Fyfield, Hill spends a lot of time with the characters - they include the laid-back lover of the murderer and her comedian friend - to good effect. And she holds our attention as she works through the woman's backstory and current crisis. There's a bit too much stand-up comedy but there's a good twist and, overall, it's a fine read. A writer to watch.

Part of Hill's book is set in Edinburgh during the festival. Allan Guthrie's second novel, Savage Night (Polygon £9.99, pp298), is also set in Edinburgh but you wouldn't know it was the same city. Actually, the setting is almost irrelevant as Guthrie explores the simple premise of a man taking revenge on another man and his family with little psychological acuity but a lot of (entertaining) horror.

Fyfield's novel starts with a finger cut off; Guthrie's starts with a headless corpse. I don't think the difference is gender-specific but it may say something about Scottish humour, for Savage Night is a black comedy akin to the work of Christopher Brookmyre and Douglas Lindsay. It also has a neo-noir feel - think Blood Simple or Scott Phillips's The Ice Harvest. There are a lot of body parts and a tight plot with a terrible inevitability about it. And I love the fact that one main character is a hard man who faints at the sight of blood. If you have a robust sense of humour, you'll love this.

Finally, the first of a proposed series in which golden-age novelist and playwright Josephine Tey goes sleuthing. In Nicola Upson's An Expert in Murder (Faber £12.99, pp352), Tey is in London for the final week of her successful play when she gets drawn into a murder mystery. Upson's plot is cunning and she skilfully recreates 1930s theatreland. If you can accept the blend of fact and fiction using a real person in a novel entails, this is entertaining stuff.

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbTEoKyaqpSerq96wqikaJqfpLi0e5FpZ3FnkaW%2FcHyVaJqroZ2ar7C7yqxln52RqcKzsdI%3D