Crime Fiction

A new publisher devoted to English translations of contemporary best-selling French fiction enters the lists with Murder On The Eiffel Tower by Claude Izner (Gallic Books, £7.99). It's set around the Universal Exposition of 1889 in Paris, where the newly opened Eiffel Tower is the centre of all attention.

A woman dies on the Tower, apparently stung by a bee. More bee-sting deaths follow, all gleefully reported by a burgeoning popular press.

But bookseller Victor Legris has good reason to want to solve the mystery, as the evidence seems to point to the two people who mean most to him in the world.

It's a charming and amusing whirl around a time of rapid social and intellectual change and a promising and confident start for Gallic Books.

There's also a Gallic flavour to Louise Penny's Dead Cold(Headline, £6.99), set in a prosperous village in Quebec, all the variously eccentric inhabitants of which are suspects when a much-loathed newcomer is electrocuted during the traditional Boxing Day curling match.

Penny's second novel is a simply wonderful read. Mixing elements of the village whodunnit, the police procedural and the psychological crime novel, it ends up as something entirely its own.

The writing is exuberant and frequently very funny and the characters - led by Chief Inspector Armand Gamache - memorable. This author is already collecting awards in Canada and in Britain and, if she carries on producing books this delightful and unusual, she'll soon have to buy a new mantelpiece to keep all the trophies on.

Plainer fare is offered by Andrew Gross in his new thriller The Blue Zone (Harper, £6.99). The title is apparently a phrase used by the witness protection programme in the US when a relocated witness vanishes from his new life and loses contact with his FBI handler - which gives you a fair idea of the story. A racing pace and constant twists make up for Gross's unambitious prose.

In T Jefferson Parker's Storm Runners (HarperCollins, £12.99), two Californian school friends take very different paths - one becomes a cop, one a gang lord - but continue to be linked by the woman whom they had each dated in school. Before the novel begins, their divergence has become a blood feud and left policeman Matt Stromsoe widowed and half-blind.

Having lost time to booze and bitterness, he starts work as a private eye, his first assignment being to bodyguard a TV weather forecaster who believes that she's being stalked.

Meanwhile, Mike, his pal turned ultimate enemy, is still running his gang from a maximum security prison. When a utility company executive approaches him for help with an uppity "weathergirl" whose after-hours work threatens to destroy his monopoly, Mike sees an opportunity to kill several birds with one stone.

A familiar plot in an unusual setting is told through writing which seems quiet and unshowy, but at the same time almost exquisitely fine. This is the work of a craftsman at his peak.