Crime Fiction

HER stunning beauty ensures that Gretchen Lowell, now serving life, is one of the most favourite serial killers in the US.

But to the detective who was in charge of hunting her - and who became her last victim, albeit the one who survived - she is an unbearable psychological burden.

Why did she let him go? And why did she give herself up, after years of avoiding the law?

In Heartstick by Chelsea Cain (Pan, £6.99), Archie Sheridan is back at work in Portland, Oregon, after two years on sick leave, again hunting killers and still unable to give up his weekly visits to Gretchen.

I'm confident that I'll never again read a truly original serial-killer thriller - there can't be a twist which hasn't already been twisted in this overworked field.

What makes this book worth reading is simply the quality of the writing. Cain is witty, acute and spry.

Chris was in love with Alison in Andrew Humphrey's Alison (TTA Press, £9.99) and he thought that they were happy.

He's unsure whether her death was murder or suicide. Either is puzzling, though perhaps either could be explained by her horrifying family, ruled by a gangsterish matriarch whose money comes from what is euphemistically termed "security."

At least Chris can rely on his two closest friends - perhaps.

This first novel by a much-admired East Anglian short-story writer demonstrates the foundations on which he's built his enviable reputation - a deep interest in the relations between his characters and, particularly, in how those relationships become fractured. He has a smooth, easy style which is ornamented rather than interrupted by his gift for sharp phrase-making.

More dark goings-on in East Anglia in Patrick Lennon's Steel Witches (Hodder, £19-99), as private eye and ex-cop Tom Fletcher is dragged into investigating the murder of a physics student who had been working in a hostess bar.

Tom's involvement is via his parents, neither of whom he's seen in many years. But their part in the story is only one of the mysteries involving old witchcraft trials, US air bases, nose-cone art from WW2 fighter planes and the British arm of a high-tech US company.

It's a very unusual story, containing elements of conspiracy thriller, adventure, family saga and historical mystery in two different eras - hard to categorise, easy to enjoy.

And so to the last-ever appearance of the character that many of us claim as the greatest Detective Inspector of them all, DI Jack Frost.

A Killing Frost (Bantam, £14.99), published posthumously, is the sixth and last novel by the great radio writer RD Wingfield, who was always reluctant to turn from his preferred medium to that of print.

As ever, it sees Frost rushing around his fictional beat of Denton in increasingly frantic circles, chasing murderers and other assorted villains, dodging No Smoking signs and desperately trying to stay one step ahead as his superiors plot his downfall.

Without rival as a writer of comic crime, without mercy as an observer of human frailty, Wingfield, like Frost, is simply irreplaceable.