No mere mortal can resist the evil of the thriller

Recent reviewing opportunities have given me a bit of a crash course in thrillers, a genre of which I've hitherto been rather dismissive. The vicarious thrill of shoot-outs and car chases and desperate races against time is not really what I look for. It has surprised me, though, to discover quite how much the standard varies, even between authors who are notionally aimed at the same sort of readership.

The Hunt for Atlantis, the debut novel from film critic Andy McDermott, was one which I found immensely entertaining. The author's background as a writer on film is very apparent: he has an eye for visual detail and his characters are never left on the sidelines in deference to the main thrust of the plot.

He also provides a strong female character, archaeologist Nina Wilde, something which was completely beyond Joseph Finder, whose Power Play happened to be the book I read next. His women are all icy blondes, apparently steeled by past betrayals against the possibility of romance but with the weakness for the whichever of the gun-wielding, stubble-chinned macho men turns out to be the manly yet tender hero. The plot is entirely linear - team-building executives in a remote mountain lodge are taken hostage - and there's plenty of grimacing as crippling injuries are shrugged off with manly fortitude as mere scratches.

I also happened upon Alex Chance's The Final Days, another of the innumerable conspiracy thrillers with which the market has been flooded since The Da Vinci Code charmed even the doughtiest of resistance fighters against literary banality. The plot is jolly exciting, of course, twisting and turning its way through perils and subterfuges of bewildering variety. I'm sure the film rights were snapped up long ago and no doubt in a summer or so cinemas will be screening yet another blockbusting festival of special effects with a cast market-researched to appeal to the appropriate demographic. But the writing is atrocious and passes the Dan Brown test with flying colours: any sentence selected at random will be something so clumsily expressed it sets your teeth on edge.

But then I read John Hart's Down River - presently due the Richard & Judy treatment - and found myself utterly engrossed. Efficiently written, it was only after I scoffed for the third time at how transparent was the guilt of a character that it struck me what a cunning little dance I was being lead on. I also read The Double Bind by Chris Bohjalian: set in the present day, it makes inspired use of the story of The Great Gatsby in whipping the rug from right under the reader's feet with estimable adroitness.

And then I came to John le Carré's A Most Wanted Man, one of the few highlights of a decidedly meagre autumn schedule for fiction this year. I knew of course he writes espionage thrillers and had read one before, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, which had impressed me without making me feel inclined to read another.

But for reasons which, if specified, would involve name-dropping on a wearisome scale, I have just read this latest one. Its three main characters - a Chechen refugee, his idealistic lawyer and the banker who holds his father's questionably acquired assets in a secret account - are toyed with by competing intelligence services and each is motivated by threats and temptations expertly formulated to appeal to their respective instincts.

The setting is post-9/11 Hamburg, a city struggling to come to terms with the likelihood that Mohammed Atta and his Al-Qaeda cell plotted their atrocities living there. Consternation results from appearance of the refugee, Issa, and while he and his two wary allies try to reconcile their desires with their fears, the security services plot to ensure an acceptable conclusion to the affair.

The existence of the camp at Guantanamo Bay and the little we know of 'extraordinary rendition' has shown us that the faintest possibility of any terrorist connection provokes an uncompromising response from America and Britain. Public concerns are dismissed by the invocation of the war on terror even as the freedoms supposedly at stake are whittled away. Have we become so complacent and cosy in our introspective lifestyles and so inured to the distant fall-out that we are simply deaf to the suffering caused in our names?

Or it is that the words of politicians, those who have greatest influence of the priorities and principles of our society, are now so self-servingly empty that the public conscience has no voice? If so, then it is of vital importance that we have people of le Carré's stature and integrity to ensure that the issue of what it is right to sacrifice to preserve civilisation as we understand it cannot be scrubbed from the agenda.