Taylor Lockwood, jazz-playing paralegal heroine of Mistress of Justice, is one of the smart, sassy heroines in whom Jeffery Deaver specialised before he invented the austere, paralysed criminalist Lincoln Rhyme. Like Rune in Manhattan Is My Beat, Taylor is clever, but not quite as good at things as she thinks she is-she trusts a few too many people and lets her preconceptions get in her way; Deaver has always done a nice line in the detective who gets things wrong quite a lot of the time. Taylor is brought in by Reece, a Wall Street hot-shot, to work out who has stolen a crucial document and where they have hidden it. Along the way, she uncovers most of the dirty little secrets of the partners of the firm and finds herself having to exercise judgement about each of them; she has refused to follow her father into the law because of her music, but she finds herself caught up in justice all the same. This is an early book that Deaver has reworked-it has the technical slickness that is now his hallmark, but keeps the joie de vivre that it has to some extent replaced. -Roz Kaveney.

Likened to a "young Muhammad Ali", Alex Cross, the Porsche-driving profiler, doctor, detective and father of two has seen his fair share of vicious killers. From a bloodthirsty butcher who came after his family (Cat and Mouse) to a devilish duo working cross-country (Kiss the Girls), Cross has managed to out-manoeuvre all of his enemies. Until he meets the Weasel. A series of killings in the forgotten, crime-infested ghettos of southeastern DC has sent Cross and his 6'9" 250-pound-partner, John Sampson in search of the "Jane Doe" killer. However, their racist, tyrannical boss George Pitman orders them to stay out of the southeast and investigate the high-profile murder of a wealthy white man. Cross already has suspicions that the murders are linked, but when Sampson's ex turns up in an abandoned southeast warehouse kicked to death, the two detectives carry on with their original investigation. Meanwhile, Cross's long-time love, Christine, (Cat and Mouse) has taken prominence in his life and it looks as if the two will finally get hitched-with one hitch: Cross leaves the force. Although Cross's instinct tells him to quit-to not put everything he loves in jeopardy again-he's compelled to catch the Weasel. Akin to a slick, Hollywood action flick, Pop Goes the Weasel doesn't have time for meaningful character development and thoughtful moral analysis. And it doesn't need to. [+]

It must be daunting for an author to be compared to Graham Greene, John Le Carré and Robert Harris, but Alan Furst's much acclaimed sequence of novels set during the 1930s and World War Two unquestionably demonstrate the virtues of his predecessors: brilliantly detailed backgrounds in which the periods involved are faultlessly conjured up; highly impressive plotting and (his ace in the hole) characterisation that has all the richness and complexity of the very best writers. With Kingdom of Shadows, Furst moves his writing on to yet another level: the sense of danger and foreboding that informs this tale of intrigue and betrayal brings the reader the all-too-rare rush of excitement that only the finest novels in this field can convey. It's 1938, and a sinister tide of Fascism is growing in strength throughout Europe. Ex-cavalry officer Nicholas Morath (originally from Hungary) returns to his young mistress in Paris's Seventh Arrondissement. He has been helping his uncle Count Janos Polanyi, a diplomat, in his attempt to stop Hungary drifting into an allegiance with Nazi Germany. But this is a very dangerous game for Morath and his uncle, involving double dealing between defectors, SS renegades and British politicians. And as Hitler marches into Prague, Morath's foolhardy country-hopping endeavours grow ever more dangerous. On the level of a highly intelligent espionage tale, Furst demonstrates a masterly command of the idiom, with Polanyi's dangerous odysseys between the Czech fortresses of the Sudeten mountains and the villas of Budapest handled in an utterly authoritative fashion. The driving force behind his narrative is always the struggles within the souls of his characters, and the way the human spirit can survive under the most appalling conditions. Morath, in particular, is drawn with all the complexity and insight that has become Furst's trademark, and we follow his journeys with ever-mounting concern. [+]

Age and experience has not withered VI Warshawski. In Sara Paretsky's latest tale, Total Recall, the uncompromising and wildly unconventional private investigator chases leads and suspects around Chicago "like a pinball, careening around the city", despite the fact that she is now positively the wrong side of 40. Paretsky's heroine is called in to investigate a seemingly simple case of insurance fraud (one of her specialities), when things get rather more complicated. At a conference on Christian-Jewish relations, the media is attracted by two very different stories: while protesters outside call for the recovery of Holocaust assets from insurance companies in denial, inside, a middle-aged Jewish man-helped by a recovered-memory therapist-recalls a childhood devastated by Nazis. Warshawski soon becomes involved in both stories. As her journalist boyfriend prepares for a trip to Afghanistan to investigate the dismal human rights record of the Taliban (a timely, if not prescient, angle from Paretsky), a friend of his staying from New York decides to embark on a book on recovered memory, inspired by a TV special on the therapist and her star client. Hired by the author to help check out the duo's authenticity, VI finds herself on a collision course between the past and the present and between her professional life and her close friendship with a group of Jewish friends. One of these, the spiky surgeon Lotty Herschel (a regular Warshawski character), is deeply disturbed to find her own past may be linked in some way to that of the troubled client. With her sharp wit, cynicism and daredevil approach to her job, Warshawski is as annoyingly loveable as ever. There are enough twists and turns to this, her latest outing, to offer a challenging read to die-hard fans and newcomers alike. [+]