Darkness Rising, By Frank Tallis

In the Austrian Alps, a middle-aged man begins a punishing climb. On reaching the summit, he is startled by a voice: "Are you a doctor?" He is not alone – it is a serving girl from his hotel. "How did you know?" he asks; she replies that it's in the visitors' book. She tells him that sometimes she can't breathe, and that there's a hammering in her head. And something very disturbing happens. She sees things – a face that fills her with horror.

The historical crime writer and clinical psychologist Frank Tallis is fond of relating this fragment of story: an isolated locale, an unexpected encounter, an unnerving confession. Is it a little-known work by a celebrated crime writer? An early film by Alfred Hitchcock? Neither. This is a précis of the first pages of "Katharina" by Sigmund Freud; case number 4 in Studies on Hysteria (1895). While the classic detective story may have sprung from the literary loins of Poe and co, there is an argument for the indirect cross-fertilisation of the genre via the influence of psychoanalysis. Freud has long been an éminence grise behind crime fiction, even appearing in person in novels such as Jed Rubenfeld's The Interpretation of Murder.

Tallis's fiction is transmuted through his experiences as a clinician. His series The Liebermann Papers, murder mysteries set in Freud's Vienna, make assiduous use of psychology. Dr Max Liebermann is an early acolyte of Freud and uses the new science as a forensic tool. A feature is Liebermann's authentic psychoanalytic techniques (close observation of small errors, dream interpretation). Typically, plots revolve around an impossible crime, in the context of some closed community: in Mortal Mischief, a spiritualist circle; in Vienna Blood, a proto-Nazi secret society; in Fatal Lies, a military school.

Darkness Rising is perhaps the most accomplished entry so far, and once again airs key themes for Tallis: the conflict between reason and emotion, and the origins of National Socialism.

The headless corpse of a monk is found in a baroque church, with a municipal councillor another decapitated victim. The murdered men were both passionate anti-Semites, and Vienna's Hassidic Jews appear to be the prime suspects. Psychoanalyst and police aide Liebermann may reject the religious certainties of his fellow Jews, but is drawn into the world of the Kabbalah to discover a dangerous truth.

While the mechanics of thriller plotting are handled as adroitly as ever, Tallis has perhaps made a rod for his own back. The anti-Semitism theme is so trenchantly handled – Liebermann outrages a priest by an act of kindness, preventing the last rites being given to a dying man unaware of his state, and makes himself a target- that the reader may wonder why Tallis doesn't simply write about the hothouse mores of fin-de-siècle Vienna without the mystery elements.