A new Marian Keyes novel is always something to celebrate, and her sixth novel, Angels, will have you cheering. From the first couple of sentences: "I'd always lived a fairly blameless life. Up until the day I left my husband and ran away to Hollywood, I'd hardly ever put a foot wrong" to the hugely satisfying last page, you're immediately involved in the story of Maggie Walsh's life; of how it went wrong, and then went right again. The Walshes starred in a previous Keyes novel, the delightful Rachel's Holiday; Maggie is Rachel's older sister, (one of five) and the only one who "never did any of that nasty sleeping around business". Instead she got married to her first boyfriend Paul Garvan and everything was fine, until they suffered a couple of "setbacks". Unable to face sorting out the difficulties, Maggie hightails it to Los Angeles to stay with her old pal Emily. Emily is a script writer, her short film A Perfect Day was a big hit in Ireland, but her working life is a little tougher in the land of sunshine and fat-free Pringles. The two girls, along with a supporting cast of wannabes, scary film studio folk and slacker next door neighbours, get on with sorting out their emotional issues in a stylishly witty, wonderfully warm fashion. Maggie's devilish ex-boyfriend and the commitment phobic Troy add in a delightful frisson of sexual tension. Marian Keyes observations on the foibles of love and LA are laugh-out-loud funny, but there's a beguiling tenderness there too. [+]

The art of inducing fear in a reader via the printed page is a speciality of only a few skilled craftsmen. Mark Billingham is such an author, and Sleepy Head is such a book. The blurb on the jacket warns that we are in for a disturbing experience and that is precisely what we get: "He doesn't want you alive. He doesn't want you dead. He wants you somewhere in between". The killer who Billingham's protagonist Tom Thorne is up against is a particularly creepy specimen: he has savagely killed three victims but his fourth, although alive, is perhaps not so fortunate. She has undergone a deliberately induced stroke and although all her senses are intact, she is totally unable to move or communicate. This hideous condition, called Locked-in Syndrome is, however, quite possibly the killer's first miscalculation. [+]

Last Light is a resounding demonstration of Andy McNab's evolving abilities, offering a richer level of plotting, along with the customary well-turned rough stuff. McNab might initially have seemed to be some kind of briefly shining star in the bestseller firmament, his SAS experience and well-advertised pseudonym guaranteeing a couple of toughly authentic thrillers in the style of Bravo Two Zero, and no more. But such successive books as Firewall, Remote Control and Crisis Four have categorically demonstrated that he has more than enough top-flight skills to sustain a long writing career. In Last Light, after terminating an officially approved assassination bid at the Houses of Parliament when he realises the identity of the intended target, McNab's hard-as-nails protagonist Nick Stone, "deniable operator" of the intelligence services, is severely disciplined by his bosses. He is told to travel to Panama and finish the job, or he and Kelly (the 11-year-old girl he is guarding) will be "taken care of" themselves. As Nick gets ready for his assignment in central America, he soon finds that his enemies have turned the tables on him: he is now the hunted, and finds himself up to his neck in a murky plot involving Colombian rebels and the US government. All the usual McNab fingerprints are here: not too much shading, but flinty characterisation and a barrel load of high-velocity action. -Barry Forshaw.

As the number one bestselling saga writer in this country, Josephine Cox utilises elements of her own tough past to create a tale that is both involving and effective, while always being firmly grounded in reality. Cox has created some memorable and distinctive heroines, but Looking Back's Molly Tattersall is something special: a character who undergoes considerable change under the great stresses that are placed upon her, and with whom the reader strongly identifies. Molly's mother has disappeared, leaving only a letter in which she asks her daughter to look after her five brothers and sisters. She cannot depend upon her feckless father, who similarly neglects his duties, and she is put in an impossible situation. She must choose between the young man she loves or, forsaking her happiness, look after the children. It is the hardest decision she has ever had to make. And while we are caught up in the drama of Molly's difficult choices, Cox is working her magic with other plot strands that will ultimately become important. Who was the stranger who called upon her mother shortly before she disappeared? It is a cliché to describe a writer like Cox as a born storyteller, but there is simply no other way to describe her appeal. Nevertheless, other elements are subtly utilised by the author to weave her spell: a powerful sense of time (Looking Back begins in the summer of 1948, and the reader is always conscious of the passing of time); then there are the evocatively drawn locales. Most of all, though, it is the characterisation that remains Cox's trump card, and here, particularly with the beleaguered Molly, she excels herself. [+]

Rosie Richardson, short-skirted, under-appreciated Publicity Gel, dumps her egotistical, bullying, TV presenter boyfriend and heads to Africa to save the natives. But after four years in the plains, a plague of locusts and civil war take their toll, the frustrated and disillusioned Rosie is pushed back to her media-dahling roots in London. Armed with a bucket full of will power, she fends off the determined amorous advances of her ex whilst trying to enlist his celebrity-pulling power to further her personal Cause Celeb: a Live Aid inspired celebrity television appeal to raise cash for food in the country she left behind. Cause Celeb isn't exactly ground breaking but it does manage to bring a little gravitas to what is basically a novel about love, sex and a world where insincere celebs are fawned over by all and sundry. The descriptions of the African camp where Rosie spends four years of her life (concentrating on her career until a doctor-hunky, naturally-woos her over a few bloodied bodies) are vivid enough to force the dramatic irony forward as Rosie's past and present collide, and her jaded experiences of London life will certainly ring true for many readers. All in all, Cause Celeb is the kind of book you might read in the bath or on the beach-not too taxing but involving and spirited enough to make you want to find out what happens in the end. -Susan Harrison.

In Prey, bestselling author Michael Crichton introduces bad guys that are too small to be seen with the naked eye but who are no less deadly or intriguing than the runaway dinosaurs that made 1990's Jurassic Park such a blockbuster success. High-tech whistle-blower Jack Forman used to specialise in programming computers to solve problems by mimicking the behaviour of efficient wild animals-swarming bees or hunting hyena packs, for example. Now he's unemployed and is finally starting to enjoy his new role as stay-at-home dad. All would be domestic bliss if it were not for Jack's suspicions that his wife, who's been behaving strangely and working long hours at the top-secret research labs of Xymos Technology, is having an affair. When he's called in to help with her hush-hush project, it seems like the perfect opportunity to see what she's been doing, but Jack quickly finds there's a lot more going on in the lab than an illicit affair. Within hours of his arrival at the remote testing centre, Jack discovers his wife's firm has created self-replicating nanotechnology-a literal swarm of microscopic machines. Originally meant to serve as a military eye in the sky, the swarm has now escaped into the environment and is seemingly intent on killing the scientists trapped in the facility. The reader realises early, however, that Jack, his wife and their fellow scientists have more to fear from the hidden dangers within the lab than from the predators without. The monsters may be smaller in this book, but Crichton's skill for suspense has grown, making Prey a scary read that's hard to set aside. It's not without minor flaws: the science in this novel requires more explanation than did the cloning of dinosaurs, leading to lengthy and sometimes dry academic lessons. [+]

Marian Keyes begins Watermelon with a rather inauspicious romantic opening when the heroine's husband leaves her for Denise from the flat downstairs the day their first child is born. Claire, the deserted wife and mother, returns to her family in Dublin and, after going through the required stages of "Loss, Loneliness, Hopelessness and Humiliation", begins to feel much better-so much better that when James tries to win his way back into her affections, he gets more than he bargained for. The author's style is too blunt and her setting too suburban (with its all-too-human heroine struggling to keep her sanity, tend to her new-born baby, fight it out with siblings and begin to love again) to be a traditional romance, but there is enough chemistry and mystery to keep you guessing in the lip-smacking Watermelon-a dish that may not fill you up but will certainly give you a taster of Marian Keyes' work, of which there is much to sample, including Lucy Sullivan is getting Married, Rachel's Holiday and Last Chance Saloon. -Nicola Perry.