The Blue Edge of Midnight

Jonathon King is a journalist who spent decades working for Philadelphia newspapers before moving to southern Florida. His character in this debut novel, Max Freeman, is a Philly cop who has fled to southern Florida to escape a tragic past. Clearly, then, King is following the writer's dictum and writing what he knows. As a journalist, King's style is economical and unencumbered. It can also be dispassionate, which is a good trait for a newspaperman but perhaps less so for a novelist. The story is kind of an odd amalgam of James Lee Burke writing Robicheaux, crossed with the Florida politics of Carl Hiaasen, minus any hint of humour. King likes the wet, fecund atmosphere of the Everglades, the impending storm, the sounds and the light. Max Freeman is hiding from his past in a remote cabin in the Everglades, but he gets caught up in a case involving an eco-terrorist turned mass murderer (in a sick twist, the victims are all children). King moves from start to finish efficiently, creates an adequate mystery, handles his people well, but fails to provide any sense of surprise.

In the Hand of Dante

This is a powerful, often perplexing book. Maintaining the alliterative theme, it is also at times profound and thoroughly profane. It mostly follows two separate but associated story lines, with frequent diversions into sub-plots whose relationships to the main themes are only belatedly made clear - not that anything is ever really clear.

The first strand involves a man in present time, on a spiritual quest, which involves wandering deep into Latin America looking for a beach and a hammock. This man is revealed to be a writer named Nick Tosches, author of books such as Hellfire, Power on Earth and The Devil and Sonny Liston.

The second strand follows a poet in 14th century Italy, and his spiritual quest to find God in his writing. The poetπs name is Dante Alighieri.

Back in our time, a Vatican priest makes an amazing discovery, the lost writings of Dante, the original manuscripts of The Divine Comedy. The writer Nick Tosches is summoned from his hammock by a powerful crime boss named Joe Black, and sets out to obtain the manuscripts.

Clearly this is no ordinary book. Along the way, Tosches rants against the artifice of writing and then writes to the pinnacle of pretension. He is in turn poetic, insightful, crude and utterly inscrutable. Especially in Danteπs voice, he wanders for hundreds of words, and it is beautiful and spiritual, often deeply moving but equally as often chaotic.

truecrime

The third novel from this rising star of British crime fiction does a terrific job of recreating the mood of England heading into the 1990s, the rise of New Labour and Cool Britannia, and the burgeoning club scene, fuelled by ecstasy and cocaine and populated by all manner of spivs, crims, wide boys and Eastenders. He is also good at mixing fact and fiction to give his characters a livable place to act out their stories. One-third of his ensemble is a group trying to make a Tarrantino-inspired movie, tapping into the rising Zeitgeist (and which could be seen as the birth of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels). The book has a lovely structure, following three main people and their entourages. Each chapter is dedicated to one of the three, and as the story progresses there is increasing cross-pollination between the groups. One of the three, Tony Meehan, is a luckless hack reduced to ghosting true-crime memoirs for ageing hard and wise guys. He gives the book its Orwellian title. At the heart of the story is Harry Stacks, a name fans will recognise from Arnott's previous efforts.•

Jeff Glorfeld