Book reviewer ANNA CREER looks at three new titles by crime writers at the top of their game.

Arnaldur Indridason is the most celebrated of all the Nordic crime writers. 

He has won not only the Nordic Glass Key and the CWA dagger, but also the Premio RBA de Novela Negra, the world’s most lucrative crime fiction prize worth 125,000 euros ($A224,000). 

The Quiet Mother (Harvill) is the latest in his series featuring the retired policeman Konrad. When a woman is found murdered in her Reykjavik apartment the police discover a note with Konrad’s phone number. Konrad is horrified as the woman, Valborg, had asked him to find the child she had surrendered at birth 50 years earlier. 

Konrad torments “himself for not having done anything for her. Over and over, he’d thought of her in the weeks since their meeting… he wished he’d been more understanding, and more sympathetic to her suffering”.

His torment increases when he learns Valborg had been diagnosed with advanced pancreatic cancer. “Now every time Valborg came to mind he felt a deep pang of regret.” 

Konrad’s resulting investigation, beginning with only one piece of information, that a midwife persuaded Valborg not to have an abortion, is as meticulous as it is persistent. 

A warning that Indridiason’s style is quite distinctive, with echoes of the storytelling tradition of the Icelandic sagas. But the end result is a powerful exploration of shame, desperation and cruel destiny. 

ANNE Cleeves’ new novel The Killing Stones (Macmillan) marks the return of Jimmy Perez, who last appeared in Wild Fire (2018), which ended with Perez moving to Orkney with his partner, Chief Inspector Willow Reeves. 

Cleeves has said: “I really thought that I’d finished with him because when he was on his own he was a bit miserable and he got me feeling a bit depressed with him and I didn’t really want to write any more about him… but then I wanted to know what happened” to him and Willow. 

Perez and Willow now have a four-year-old son and Willow is expecting their second child.

After a violent storm, Perez’s closest friend Archie Stout is found dead at the neolithic archeological site of Noltland on Westray. The weapon is one of the Westray Neolithic story stones. 

Perez is perplexed because Archie was larger than life and popular on the island. The police investigation reveals secrets and lies about the Stout family in both the past and the present, all set against a backdrop of various famous Neolithic sites on Orkney. 

Cleeves spent time on Orkney before writing The Killing Stones and her love of the landscape is obvious. She describes it as gentler and softer than Shetland, but the crimes committed and the grief that follows are just as violent and bleak. 

CANBERRA novelist Chris Hammer brings back Martin Scarsden in his latest novel, Legacy (Allen&Unwin). Martin is no longer “the anchorless foreign correspondent, the lone wolf, the lost soul”.

He’s living in Port Silver, surrounded by family and friends. But at the launch of his latest book, a true-crime expose of the Melbourne Mafia, the venue is bombed and snipers target Martin and his friends. 

ASIO’s Jack Goffing reveals a contract has been taken out on Martin and advises him to escape into the outback, beyond Burke to the small town of Port Paroo. There he finds a pub and “not much else. There’s no school, no cafe, no stock and station agent. Just the pub and attached to it… a general store-cum-post-office-cum-petrol-station”. Population, 12. 

It’s summer, “February hot: desert hot, where the air temperature doesn’t come close to explaining the force of the sun. Mad dogs and journalists. And fugitives”. However, the “old Geezer” who fills up Martin’s car tells him to stay in the pub overnight because rain is forecast and when it does, the police will close the roads. 

Paroo is dominated by two great rural properties, the Carmichael’s Longchamp Downs and the Stanton’s Tavelly station. There’s been a feud between the families for generations over water.

When the Stantons tell Martin they can prove the Carmichaels are illegally capturing water before it reaches the flood plains, Martin can’t resist such an exclusive story. But then his cover is blown and his troubles escalate. 

Legacy is tense and thrilling You can almost feel the heat and sense the danger of an Australian desert in Hammer’s vivid prose.