Crime books in brief: The Affair | Before the Poison | The Cut

Mark Sanderson casts his eye over the latest crime novels

The Affair

by Lee Child

(Bantam, £18.99) ***

A woman is found with her throat cut in Carter Crossing, a one-horse town in “the armpit of Mississippi”. The fact that there is a large army base nearby – home to a couple of companies engaged in secret operations in Kosovo – complicates matters. Jack Reacher, still a major in the military police – this being March 1997, before the events of his debut in Killing Floor – is sent undercover. The Affair is by no means a typical Reacher adventure. For a start, the 36-year-old avenging angel, a man of “no ambition and very few needs”, narrates the story himself. There is plenty of action, but it’s also much more of a whodunit than anything Lee Child has previously written. His style is becoming increasingly rhetorical, yet the gripping plot and breathtaking violence ensure it is difficult to put down.

Before the Poison

by Peter Robinson

(Hodder, £18.99) ***

After the death of his beloved wife Laura, Oscar-winning composer Christopher Lowndes returns from Hollywood to his native Yorkshire. It is only after he has bought the remote Kilnsgate House on the outskirts of Richmond that he learns the former mistress of the manor was hanged for poisoning her husband, a callous doctor, in the 1950s. Slowly Lowndes becomes convinced that beautiful Grace Fox was innocent. This ambitious stand-alone novel boasts all the benefits and some of the drawbacks of Robinson’s DCI Banks procedurals. There is more local colour than in an edition of National Geographic: not just in Yorkshire but France, South Africa and the Far East. As usual Robinson keeps you guessing until the end but he doesn’t half dawdle. And Lowndes’s own shabby, heart-breaking secret ultimately feels both cheap and something of a cheat.

The Cut

by George Pelecanos

(Orion, £12.99) *****

Spero Lucas, a 29-year-old veteran of Iraq, is now a private investigator in Washington. When a jailed marijuana dealer asks him to retrieve two stolen consignments, Lucas agrees – for a 40 per cent cut. However, when two of the dealer’s young lieutenants are shot in the face, Lucas has to call on all the lethal skills he learned in the alleyways of Fallujah. No-one does violence like Pelecanos, but he is unusual in the way he embeds it in a narrative that explores the age-old themes of family and belonging. Lucas is another of his self-contained characters whom you can’t help rooting for: he is tough and kind but haunted by the early death of his adoptive father as well. Pelecanos is also unusual in the care he takes in portraying his hero’s stamping-ground: the US capital is a fascinating character in its own right. The result is a bloody, brooding thriller of rare authenticity.