Revenge may be sweet, but it's a sugar high. In the end, you're left with nothing but a bad taste in your mouth. Take it from Ned Maddstone, whose intricate web of retribution wins him the most hollow of victories in Stephen Fry's thriller, Revenge (Random House, 316 pages, $23.95).
In a clever retelling of The Count of Monte Cristo, Fry -- the British author and comic actor (he was the inspector in Gosford Park) -- morphs Alexander Dumas' world into the present. Like Dumas' Edmund Dantes, Fry's Ned Maddstone is a naive, young man who, through jealousy, treachery and plain, old bad luck, winds up secreted away in an island prison for nearly 20 years. But Maddstone's prison is no dungeon. He's held hostage in a Swedish mental hospital where he's drugged and therapized into believing his name is Thomas and Ned Maddstone is merely a psychotic delusion.
The fun starts when Thomas / Ned hooks up with Babe, a longtime patient who's the sanest and smartest one there. He's also the most interesting character in the book and steals the pages like Julia Roberts steals the screen. Babe makes it his mission to get Thomas in touch with his inner Ned and then spends years teaching him everything he knows, which is encyclopedic. The old man dies and the no-longer naive Maddstone escapes into a changed, new world. Fry uses his sly humor to show this world through Maddstone's eyes. Particularly funny is a scene involving cell phones.
Fry ups the satiric ante by turning Maddstone into a dot-com billionaire. It's with that vast fortune that Maddstone returns to England to exact his revenge. But like the dot.com burst, the pleasures of revenge hold only false promise.
At its best, Angel Rock (Knopf, 303 pages, $23) is a darkly atmospheric, haunting novel that marries the word literary to thriller. At its worst, which isn't that often, it's bloated and confusing with too many dream scenes.
But it's worth reading, especially if you're a Daphne du Maurier fan. Like du Maurier, Australian writer Darren Williams knows the meaning of menace. A 4-year-old boy goes missing after he and his brother get lost in the Australian Outback. The older boy, 12-year-old Tom Ferry, returns to his hometown of Angel Rock with no memory of what happened to his brother, Flynn. A few days later an Angel Rock teen commits suicide in Sydney and the tortured detective who works her case goes to Angel Rock to discover the truth. His, hers -- and Flynn's.
Williams writes with a visceral beauty. Consider the moment Tom realizes he's in love: "It washed over him, a rare and awful feeling, bought with blood, but all the more fierce for that."
English writer Mark Billingham has come up with a new twist to the twisted mind of a psychopath. The bad guy in Sleepy Head (William Morrow, 320 pages. $24.95) doesn't want to kill, he wants to create a waking death through stroke -- "locked-in syndrome," neurologists call it. When the book opens, three people are already dead from his botched attempts. His lone "success" is Alison Willetts, who is cognizant, but can't move a muscle except to blink her eyes.
Detective Inspector Tom Thorne, a tough, flawed London cop, finds himself taunted by anonymous messages from the perp, obsessing over the victims and falling in love with Anne Coburn, one of Alison's doctors. As the body count rises and his bosses lose faith in him, Thorne sticks to the case with vigilante zeal.
The plot is taut and Billingham elevates the chill factor by taking us into both the mind of the psychopath, without tipping his identity, and Alison, his locked-in victim. An exciting debut novel.
Michael McGarrity's The Big Gamble (Dutton, 272 pages, $23.95) is a just-the-facts-ma'am kind of mystery that reads like a documentary. And why not? McGarrity, a former deputy sheriff for Sante Fe County, also taught at the New Mexico Law Enforcement Academy and worked as an investigator for the public defender's office.
In spare prose with even sparer characters, McGarrity tells the story of Deputy Sheriff Clayton Isee who's trying to solve the murders of two people found in the charred remains of an abandoned fruit stand. One of the victims is a woman who's been missing for years from across the state in Sante Fe. Isee is forced to team up with the police chief there, a white man named Kevin Kerney. Kerney, it seems, recently told Isee that he is his biological father. Isee, who takes pride in his Indian heritage, is not happy with the revelation. But McGarrity's streamlined approach to character development leaves this relationship, as well as others, sketchy.
As the plot twists through political corruption, gambling and prostitution, McGarrity offers up a colorful assortment of bad guys. These are his most engaging characters and the pages jump when they're on them. His procedural details are just as compelling as his bad guys. The problem comes at the end. The payoff is off camera. And McGarrity is so good at creating his villains, you want to be there when they get their comeuppance. You're not and that's a shame.
Perhaps Acid Row (Putnam, 352 pages, $24.95) isn't the best book by which to judge acclaimed author Minette Walters. Subtle, masterful and complex are words usually attached to the British writer's work. They won't do for this one.
Better would be gruesome, unwieldy and implausible. However it's still compelling and even at her weakest, Walters cranks the tension and shows the dark side of humanity. The action takes place in a housing project nicknamed Acid Row. The residents learn a pedophile has been relocated there and stage a protest march. Meanwhile, physician Sophie Morrison pays an emergency visit to the object of the protest and is held captive. The protest erupts into a riot, Morrison taunts her captors and the only one who may be able to save her is a convict with a heart of gold.
Henry Fielding, the hero of The Crooked Man (Penguin, 224 pages, $13), is a loner and a misfit. The kind of odd little guy who wears a sweater on sunny days and spends too much time emptying liquor bottles. Fielding is an underscrapper -- a shadowy off-the-books employee for the British secret service. What he shares with the other loner-misfits of the genre -- from Phil Marlowe on down -- is a code of honor and an almost desperate need to protect the helpless. While on a rooftop surveillance job, he witnesses a murder. Soon he's involved in a high-level cover-up, body dumping and a woman in need of a champion. Irish writer Philip Davison has a laconic writing style and mordant tone that suits his eccentric protagonist and suits the action, which is quick and nasty.
Jody Jaffe is the author of three mysteries, Horse of a Different Killer, Chestnut Mare, Beware, and In Colt Blood. Her novel, Thief of Words, will be published by Warner Books in the spring of 2003. She is currently at work on her next novel, Ragspring Summer. She lives in Silver Spring.