So begins David Smith’s ‘ecothriller’, Freeze Frame (Penguin, $14.95), a fast-paced and crisply-written novel very much in the mould of Frederick Forsythe, for instance. This is Smith’s first novel, and an impressive debut it is. A naturalist and documentary film-maker himself, he writes with confidence and authority on this highly divisive theme. Appropriately it is a global story, switching from Brazil to Vancouver to Tahiti and other exotic locations too numerous to mention, as the various threads of this complexly-plotted tale of international intrigue and conspiracy unravel. The Jaguar, like Forsythe’s Jackal, is a cold-blooded and perfectly efficient mercenary armed with a high-tech movie camera that is also a laser gun, deadly accurate at long distances. But who’s paying him, and why? As you would expect, the French are very much in the frame – Smith even has a couple of frogmen, no pun intended, blow up the second Rainbow Warrior – but there’s also a sinister cartel of Brazilian-based megalomaniacs who have an interest in discrediting Greenpeace, particularly when it comes to the vexed question of mining in Antarctica, the last wilderness.

That’s the main narrative, but there’s more: a fine array of minor characters, any of whom could be villains; plenty of sudden twists; graphic violence; a smattering of explicit sex; dirty work at the crossroads. All this is written in a clinical, detached style, perfectly in keeping with the material, and though the book is unashamedly formula, little of it is predictable.

Smith has done a lot of homework, and it shows on the page. At times he overdoes this, providing great slabs of detailed information on cameras, helicopters, seaplanes, medical procedure, and so on. This can have the accumulated effect of firstly boring the reader, who doesn’t really need to know these things, and secondly of slowing down the narrative unduly. Granted this is a high-tech thriller, and a superior one, but the hardware itself is only interesting to a certain point. There’s also a problem with the ending, as is customary with books of this kind. Another quibble: ‘bureaucracy’ is spelt ‘beaurocracy’ three times during the novel – someone should have picked that up. Taken as a whole, however, Freeze Frame is highly recommended. It’s slick, sly, engrossing throughout, and thankfully free of animal-loving propaganda dressed as fiction.

Hardboiled edited by Stuart Coupe and Julie Ogden

Allen & Unwin, $16.95 pb

Stuart Coupe and Julie Ogden, the highly energetic Mean Streets team, have compiled an anthology of contemporary American crime fiction which they describe on the cover as ‘Tough, Explicit and Uncompromising’. They’re not just whistling dixie either. Hardboiled (Allen & Unwin, $16.95 pb) is exactly that, a series of journeys into the American nightmare. The cover, with its violent slashes of blue and red paint and peering eyes, sets the tone. Violence, random and premeditated, is ever-present, and the language used to describe it is frequently raw. This is brutally real crime writing, unsuited to young children or sensitive souls. There are no drawing room conundrums, no Miss Marples, not a PI in sight – unless you count Matt Scudder, Lawrence Block’s New York anti-hero in his excellent offering, ‘By Dawn’s Early Light’.

In this story Scudder, unlicensed detective, ex-husband and father, barfly, and general loser, is hired by a saloon pal named Tommy Tillary, whose wife has apparently been murdered by a couple of young Hispanic burglars. But they won’t wear it, claiming instead that Tillary put them up to it. Scudder is supposed to dig dirt on them, discredit their story. Which he does. But that’s only the start. It’s a gritty, street-level story of greed, treachery, and vengeance, and of course no one wins.

Another New Yorker, the single-minded – some might say obsessive – Andrew Vachss, is represented by yet another story about child abuse with a martial arts angle, called ‘Treatment’. But instead of Burke at the wheel of his Plymouth we have a doctor, whose job it is to ‘treat’ convicted paedophiles before they are allowed to re-enter society. You can be sure that, with Vachss calling the shots, the treatment will be distinctly surgical. No disappointments here.

There are many good, gutsy stories in this book. Particularly I liked Chet Williamson’s ‘First Kill’ about a deer-hunter who is shot, then methodically gutted, by a sniper. The American wilderness has so much potential for crazed killings of this kind. Williamson’s account of a demented mind justifying its actions is as close to the bone as anyone would want to get. There’s Rose Dawn Bradford’s ‘Principles’, about the ethics of defending a brazenly offensive child pornographer – a nasty sting in the tail here – and ‘Tony Red Dog’, by Neal Barrett Jr, a funny story about an Apache Indian working for the Mafia.

But perhaps the most powerful contribution is Joe R. Lansdale’s ‘Night They Missed the Horror Show’, about two white trash boys driving around the backblocks of somewhere like Texas one night, drunk and bored out of their tiny minds – until they rescue a black boy from a gang of hoods and make good their escape, from the frying pan into the fire. This is a truly awful story, a grotesque little one-way road trip to hell. Enjoy.

A Corpse at the Opera House edited by Stephen Knight

Allen & Unwin, $16.95

A Corpse at the Opera House (Allen & Unwin, $16.95) is the third in the successful Crimes for a Summer Christmas series, the difference this time being that the contributors are asked to concoct a tale based on a set paragraph about a body found on the steps of the Sydney Opera House, with a train ticket from Adelaide and a small silver rose next to it. There is a variety of approaches, needless to say with made-to-order stories like these, with some contributors all but bypassing the set paragraph. In particular there is a typically black and mischievous story from Elizabeth Jolley, not known as a crime writer but not out of place in the company of Peter Corris, Marele Day, Robert Wallace, Garry Disher, and the like. Corris sets his story effectively in the past, uncovering an old case, and Wallace has written an intelligent and knowing piece about sex, God, and the Devil, set (where else?) in a big Grammar school down Westernport way. Has the man no respect?

Jean Bedford’s Anna Southwood travels to Coffs Harbour and becomes enmeshed in a case involving a family inheritance, mistaken identities, and drug dealing; Robert Hood contributes a typically tough and brash tale about double-crossing underworld gunmen, and Garry Disher relates a procedural tale about a young detective learning the ropes from a seasoned one in a murder investigation. Brian Castro and Marion Halligan are represented, too, the former with an off-beat story about a pathologist and the latter in great form with a bitingly satisfying one about literary critics and the damage they can do – especially to themselves, in this case.