The Savage Garden by Mark Mills

HarperCollins, £12.99

Suffer the Little Children by Donna Leon

Heinemann (Apr), £15.99

Ask the Parrot by Richard Stark

Quercus, £10

ON THE FIRST PAGE OF The Savage Garden, Mark Mills tells us that there is going to be murder but, tauntingly, doesn’t divulge any more until a long way in.

That is no hardship to the reader. Mills writes beautifully; leading us gently and atmospherically through the Tuscan renaissance garden of the title, at the Villa Docci, unchanged for centuries and now full of mysteries and menace.

It is 1958 and Adam Strickland is there to study it for a university thesis. He is drawn into the strange lives of the villa’s family – who include the imperious but frail old lady, her scarred, lovely granddaughter and a maid who knows everything. Gradually he unravels the garden’s sinister secrets using the clues in its statues, in its obscure but meaningful inscriptions, even in its lay out. Mills reveals himself as being well-versed in the art, architecture and literature of the period. Adam unexpectedly exposes present as well as past crimes– in an unusual, captivating novel that is a cut above the norm.

Donna Leon is keeping up an astonishingly high standard. In her forthcoming Suffer the Little Children she achieves a perfect blend of characters, place, mystery and social issues. Commissario Guido Brunetti (is he the most contented family man in crime fiction?) has to investigate why a bunch of carabinierifrom Verona came to Venice in the middle of the night, broke into the apartment of a well-respected paediatrician, leaving him with severe injuries, and took away his 18-month-old son. The allegation against the doctor is that he adopted the child illegally, in effect buying him from an Albanian illegal immigrant.

Brunetti’s inquiries lead him into the sad and murky world of infertility and baby-trafficking caused by Italy’s falling birth rate. Leon handles a sensitive, emotional subject with compassion. As usual, she portrays Venice as a living, flawed city, not a smug tourist trap. Her 16th Brunetti novel is also one of her best.

While on the subject of character longevity, Richard Stark’s career criminal Parker, created in the 1960s, is still around, in his 23rd or so book. More importantly, the Parker novels continue to be invariably well written, exciting and hugely entertaining. Stark’s crisp, convincing dialogue is as good as Elmore Leonard’s.

In Ask the Parrot, Parker is on the run after robbing a bank when he meets Tom Lindhal, a resident of a shabby community. Instead of handing Parker over to the police, the embittered Lindhal tries to persuade him to assist a long-planned revenge theft. First Parker must evade the posse looking for him – which he does by joining the pursuers. The deadbeats and losers of the town take a dangerous interest in him. Will he get away again? Parker is amoral, ruthless, yet curiously sympathetic.

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