NO GOOD DEED

Among the many fine thrillers played out against the rugged Scottish Highlands, No Good Deed scores as one of the best.

Nine-year-old Jamie Buchanan watches in silent horror as a sting in a Glasgow tenement veers out of control. Across the room Sandra Smith fires away at three men who would kill her and the boy. The boy’s mother, a prostitute, lies dead, as does Sandra’s lover Luke. But minus a tart’s wig and makeup, Sandra is actually Orla McLeod working undercover with Murdo Cameron to trap Tord Svensen, a Bill Sykes for the new millennium. The reasons why Cameron and McLeod want Svensen, and the nature of their undercover work in Scotland, emerge only gradually in the cannily plotted tale. (Scott follows the Hitchcock rule of suspense: reveal the villain at once, his motives at last.) Their cover blown in the botched operation, Cameron, McLeod, and the boy head north by northwest for the snowy Highlands, which Scott renders in keen, lovely detail. On the coast, they shelter with Orla’s mother, who bears her own brutal past: the civil strife in Ireland took the lives of her husband and son, destroyed her career, and left her and Orla physically scarred. Relaxing the pace during this Highland idyll, Scott deepens characterizations. Orla contemplates her double nature, one half-warm by the cottage hearth, the other half-desperate to wrap the case in Glasgow, even if it means going there without cover. Orla, of course, gives in to the latter. Perhaps predictably, while she’s away, the child is kidnapped at gunpoint. Then, back on the site of the sting, Orla confronts a series of reversals as tricky and deadly as a North Sea gale. An epilogue finds Orla, Murdo, and the boy warmly united, the tale’s underlying moral and political issues perhaps forever unsettled.

Haste Ye Back, Manda Scott.