Recent crime fiction | 18 October 2012

Like mists and mellow fruitfulness, Val McDermid novels often arrive in autumn. The Vanishing Point (Little, Brown, £16.99) is a standalone thriller whose central character, Stephanie Harker, is a ghost writer who compiles the autographies of celebrities. Her relationship with Scarlett Higgins, a foul-mouthed reality TV star known to the nation as the Scarlett Harlot, begins on a professional level but soon lurches towards the personal.

The novel opens after Scarlett’s death from cancer. Stephanie, now the guardian of Scarlett’s five-year-old son Jimmy, is held up by security at O’Hare Airport, Chicago.  A kidnapper walks off with Jimmy and vanishes into the blue. The story develops into a double narrative: events in the present are intercut with Stephanie’s first-person narrative describing her five-and-a-half year relationship with Scarlett which has brought her and Jimmy to this point. Towards the end the strands come together and lead to an eye-blinkingly effective climax.

In this intelligent and hypnotically readable thriller, what really interests McDermid, and us, is the meaning of fame and how people deal with being famous.