Fighting evil forces

José Carlos Somoza’s The Athenian Murders
(Abacus, £10.99) is one of
the best, and certainly one
of the cleverest crime
novels of the year, as the
translator of a manuscript
describing a series of
crimes in the Athens of
Plato finds that the events
of the story are coming to
have an hallucinatory
resemblance to the events
of his own life.

James Crumley, to the
delight of all his readers,
has finally broken a long
silence with The Final
Country (HarperCollins,
£12.99), a ripsnorting,
cocaine and
bourbonfuelled ride through Texas

in the company of Milo
Mildragovitch, now
middle-aged, but still the
wildest of all private eyes.

City of Bones (Orion,
£17.99) is the latest,
perhaps the best, and
possibly the last of
Michael Connelly’s novels
about LAPD detective
Harry Bosch, while in
Jolie Blon’s Bounce
(Orion, £12.99) — as good a
James Lee Burke novel as
any—Louisiana policeman
Dave Robicheaux takes on
those forces of evil named
in the fifth chapter of St
Mark’s Gospel. Finally,
Allen Kurzweil’s The
Grand Complication
(Heinemann, £9.99),
intricate, ingenious,
erudite and amusing, is
one of the very few crime
novels to have a reference
librarian as its hero.