Recent crime fiction | 23 July 2011

John Lawton’s Inspector Troy series constantly surprises.

John Lawton’s Inspector Troy series constantly surprises. A Lily of the Field (Grove Press, £16.99), the seventh novel, has a plot stretching from Austria in 1934 to Wormwood Scrubs in 1949, via Los Alamos and Paris. Fiction rubs shoulders with fact. There are big themes — including the Holocaust, the atomic bomb and Cold War espionage — but they are linked to individual lives, beautifully and economically described.

Meret is a cellist whom we meet as a schoolgirl in prewar Vienna, and her career provides the thread that binds together the various strands of the novel. Like all the characters, she is caught up in a world changing beyond recognition; and, as their world changes, so do they. Loyalty collides with expedience; necessity with idealism. Music is constantly present in one form or another. The Auschwitz orchestra plays Bach’s Third Cello Suite for the cloth-eared commandant.