City of cultured crime survives Morse's death

Inspector Morse addicts craving their regular Oxford fix can relax. As these two novels illustrate, the link between the city and the cultured crime novel has survived the demise of the old curmudgeon.

Inspector Morse addicts craving their regular Oxford fix can relax. As these two novels illustrate, the link between the city and the cultured crime novel has survived the demise of the old curmudgeon.

Peter Millar's fictional début, Stealing Thunder, was an intelligent thriller combining continent-spanning action with an intricate story grounded in historical fact. Bleak Midwinter is a transparent attempt to repeat a successful formula, but with predictable results. Two weeks before Christmas, Rajiv Mahendra, a junior doctor at Oxford's John Radcliffe hospital, examines a patient who is showing the classic symptoms of bubonic plague. When it emerges that he worked on a housing development on the site of the former village of Nether Ditchfield, there seems to be a terrifying link. For, in the 14th century, the village's entire population was wiped out by the plague. Is it possible that the bacillus has become active again?

To Daniel Warren, an American student researching the Black Death, this is a ghoulish opportunity to see the effects of the disease and perhaps, by exploring the connections across the centuries, turn his academic work into a bestseller. He persuades his friend Rajiv to smuggle him on to the ward, and there he encounters Therry Moon, a journalist in search of a scoop. They piece together a story that involves a medical cover-up, corrupt construction companies, Porton Down and the Russian mafia. As they struggle to make sense of what they have uncovered, it becomes clear that the plague is spreading through Oxford.

Millar paces his tale well and his research is faultless. He cranks up the tension and some of the passages are first-rate. Overall, though, the book feels too calculated. The hero's nationality, the frequent tourist-brochure descriptions of picturesque Oxford and the short, "filmic" chapters all seem part of a rather hamfisted bid for the US market and movie rights. This is a readable and atmospheric novel, but a writer of Millar's quality should have done better.

Hector Macdonald's intriguing first novel also opens in Oxford, where Dr James Fieldhead, a brilliant biologist, is conducting research. He has developed a sensor which, by detecting neural impulses in the brain, can measure and possibly control human emotions. His student Ben Ashurst is to be the guinea pig in a series of trials.

In exchange for agreeing to wear the prototype device, Ben can exchange the British winter for three weeks in a luxury hotel on the Kenyan coast, accompanied by the mysterious and beautiful Cara. At first all goes well and Ben begins to fall in love with Cara. Even the prospect of a chaotic and destabilising election, contested by a violent anti-white group, cannot disturb his tranquillity.

Gradually, the dream darkens. Ben is accused of drug dealing, arrested and thrown into jail. Humiliated and terrified, he realises that Fieldhead's ambitions stretch far beyond academic research. The true tests have only now begun. Successive layers of reality are called into question and Ben is forced into a game in which the truth twists from his grasp.

This switchback journey of duplicity is orchestrated with skill and brio; and the denouement is both unexpected and teasingly ambiguous. Macdonald, who studied with Richard Dawkins, knows his subject inside-out: the narrative is peppered with fascinating insights into the far reaches of game theory and the ethical and political implications of emotion control. The Mind Game is clever and deliberately modish. Behind the smoke and mirrors lies an intelligent, provocative novel - a stylish re-interpretation of The Magus for the MTV generation.