Fear

(Dutton, 318 pages) — Jeff Abbott

The Next<$z$>

(Berkley, 312 pages) — Dan Vining

M<$>ILES Kendrick, the hero of Jeff Abbott’s new novel, Fear<$>, is not your typical crime fighter. A former private investigator turned government informant, he’s hiding out in the Federal Witness Protection Programme and undergoing therapy for post traumatic stress syndrome so severe that he’s delusional.Dead people talk to him.

Jimmy Miles, the hero of Dan Vining’s new crime novel, The Next<$>, is somewhat more unusual.

He actually IS dead.

Abbott’s novel, his eighth, is a straightforward crime thriller. Vining’s, his second, is also his second attempt to combine the sensibilities of the noir and horror genres — a trick he surprisingly manages to pull off.

In Abbott’s Fear<$>, Kendrick’s therapist is mixed up in something bad — the illegal testing of a drug that promises to be a magic pill for PTSD. If it works, the drug will be worth millions, and a lot of nasty people — including a hit man whose daughter needs the drug, and several members of a shadowy government agency — are ready to do anything, including kill, to get their hands on it. Kendrick gets involved when his therapist sends him a mysterious message saying she needs his help. Before long, bodies start piling up and Kendrick is on the run from a lot of bad guys who mistakenly think he knows more than he does.

In Vining’s The Next<$>, Miles is travelling north from Los Angeles to San Francisco on the trail of a missing woman. Miles is a “sailor”, one of the living dead who wake up from their suicides, accidents or murders baffled about why they are here, what they are supposed to do, and what fate has in store for them. There are good sailors and evil ones, and Miles is one of the good ones. Sailors can be identified by their red or blue auras, which only a fellow sailor can see.

As Miles tracks the girl, he doesn’t realise that he is actually being lured to San Francisco for a purpose that will not be revealed until the end.

Both books are characterised by competent but undistinguished prose styles, intricate plots, many grisly deaths, and weak characterisation. Abbott and Vining keep you guessing about who will live or die, but you don’t get to know the characters well enough to care what happens to them.

Still, the plots are heart-pounding enough to satisfy as undemanding beach reading.