Inevitably the slow burn bursts into life and Warshawski finds herself at the heart of a life-threatening inferno

Inevitably, the slow burn bursts into life and Warshawski finds herself at the heart of a life-threatening inferno.Paretsky always forces her readers to think. But Fire Sale is no dry polemic; it’s a human story that ratchets up the tension, leaving little space for reflection until the fire dies down and we contemplate the glowing embers. At its best, crime fiction illuminates the society we live in, and Sara Paretsky proves yet again that she is one of the genre’s most significant practitioners.Val McDermid’s latest novel is ‘The Grave Tattoo’ (HarperCollins). Alice Black, a young Australian academic, moves to Paris to write a book on “the unremarked beauty of modern things, of telephones, aeroplanes, computer screens and electric lights, of television, cars and underground transportation”. Isolated and disorientated by the growing physical and cultural distance from her working-class family and her failed relationship with her lover Stephen, Alice is saved from loneliness by a chance encounter with an elderly Japanese gentleman.

Mr Sakamoto, a survivor of the Nagasaki bomb, is also fascinated by technology and is working on a biography of Alexander Graham Bell. Their improbable but intense friendship, forged across cultures and generations, is at the heart of this novel. Two years later she gave birth to a son – the Grand-Duke Paul, later Tsar Paul I – whose paternity has never been established with certainty. By this time Catherine was passionately in love with someone herself, the dashing chamberlain Sergei Saltykov.Rounding speculates that her own initiation occurred with both men at roughly the same time in 1752. She later wrote that “after the dogs I was the most miserable creature in the world”. The marriage was not consummated for years, to the consternation of Empress Elizabeth, who expected an heir. After earnest discussions of what might be wrong, a young widow was recruited to initiate the Grand-Duke into the mysteries of sex.

If she had been more selective, especially about who took part in the court’s interminable ceremonies, it might have been a livelier read; it would also have made sense, especially in view of the subtitle, to have more analysis of Catherine’s inner life and character.This is fruitful territory for speculation. Catherine soon discovered that her husband-to-be was painfully immature, spending most of his time in his room playing soldiers. Not long before the wedding, the groom contracted smallpox, which he survived with his appearance much changed; his face was swollen and badly scarred, to a point where Catherine recorded that she found him “frightful to look at”.It was not an auspicious start to married life and, after her mother was packed off home, the couple had little to do with each other. She was summoned to the Russian court as a prospective bride in 1744, aged 14, travelling to the old capital, Moscow, with her mother, Princess Johanna Elizabeth. Sophie’s father was excluded from the invitation, which brought about their parting, while her mother was a self-centred and hypochondriac companion.Rounding records their journey in minute detail, quoting original sources at a length which may seem protracted to the general reader.