NO TRACE (Brock & Kolla Mysteries) [Paperback]

Barry Maitland is consistently good. The plot is taut, the characters believable and he always manages to throw in a surprise or two. It's satisfying reading.

In Barry Maitland's latest British crime thriller, featuring Detective Chief Inspector David Brock and Detective Sergeant Kathy Kolla, art is validated by death, and death is validated by art. Sprinkling his story with druggies and artists, gallery owners and maddeningly eccentric women, Maitland has fashioned a highly unusual tale of the sacrifices people make for their talent and even for their families.

Brock and Kolla are assigned to investigate another missing girl, the third child that has been abducted from her home in east London in recent weeks. The six-year-old Tracey Rudd is the daughter of famous artist Gabriel Rudd, and she has been living with her father in Northcote Square, a collection of artists' studios, flats and shops centered on a leafy park.

Rumor has it that there are more artists to the square mile in this neighborhood than anywhere else in Europe, with Gabriel Rudd certainly considered one of its major stars. But as Barry and Kathy begin their inquiries, they are surprised to learn that Tracey had become a part of a bitter custody battle between her father and Rudd's deceased wife's parents.

The Nolans blame their son-in-law for the suicide of Jane, their daughter, and have been angry that Gabe appears to be too self absorbed and neglectful towards his child and his own life. Kathy begins to feel a growing sense that Gabriel - dogged by possibilities of failure - doesn't seem very knowledgeable about or that interested in the details of Tracey and whether she is alive or dead.

Spurred on by Fergus Tait, his officious manager and owner of the local gallery, The Pie Factory, Gabriel decides to mount an evolving installation centering around Tracey's disappearance, the exhibition obviously playing on the word trace - the missing girl trace, lost without a trace, and the artwork itself presented in the form of tracings.

Although the presentation begins to attract a great deal of national media attention with crowds gathering daily, some people feel that Gabriel is actually exploiting Tracey's disappearance for his own purposes, the whole thing turning into a circus for his benefit. Barry and Kathy are convinced that Rudd is arranging his daughter's abduction to further his own career.

Right from the start Rudd's reaction to Tracy's disappearance has seemed ambiguous at best and he has gone out of his way to make a public spectacle of it. Not one to be easily frustrated, Tracey and Barry continue their pursuit of inside information, enlisting the aid of forensics and then embedding themselves right into the heart of this tight-knit community.

The clues keep coming back to Northcote Square, where everyone is connected to everyone else by invisible threads of history, of loss, business or desire, and the more the detectives learn, the more convoluted the motive for the kidnapping appears. The suspects gradually line-up: there's eccentric old portrait painter Reg Gilbey who spies on the kids in the playground below, the nutty old Betty Zielinski who once tried to take the kid after Jane died and claimed Tracey was hers.

There's also young artists Poppy Wilkes and Stan Dodworth, who constantly party and take drugs, retired judge Sir Jack Beaufort who is currently having his portrait painted by Reg for hanging in the National Gallery, and of course there's Fergus Tait, who will do everything he can to make money off Gabriel Rudd's career.

But when a suspect is suddenly strung up and electrocuted, killed in such a violent act - Northcote Square finds itself mired in progressively more violence. The police think they are dealing with a serial killer and become ever more worried for Tracey's fate, especially when one of the other missing girls is found unconscious, drugged and severely injured.

There is far more afoot than serial kidnapping and murdering, and as Barry and Kathy delve deeper into the lives of those at Northcote Square, they find that the perpetrator, whoever it may be has possibly been infected by the dark fantasies of Swiss-born British Romantic Painter Henry Fuseli. The murderer has discovered Rudd's own obsession with Henry Fuseli and then used his work to create a kind of ongoing drama.

No Trace offers up a compelling mix of drama and social comment, as Maitland layers his convoluted plot with the themes of child pornography, sociopathic artists, and cover-ups that exist in the highest echelons of the criminal justice system. In a case that is full of visual clues that only need to be deciphered, Kathy is sure that somewhere there exists a pattern that could make sense of Tracey's disappearance.

No matter how dangerous the situation, Barry and Kathy constantly rise above the fray, putting their own personal needs on hold, driven by the desire to find Tracey as a deceptive calm envelopes Rudd's house in Northcote Square as if nothing had really happened. This is indeed an exceptional novel by a talented author who knows how to write compelling and persuasive crime fiction. Mike Leonard December 06.