Maggie Hartford reviews the latest crop . . .

McNally's Dilemma

Lawrence Sanders

(Hodder & Stoughton, 5.99)

Steering his private detective Archy McNally through a familiar cocktail of Florida sex, sleaze and murder, Sanders comes over as a hard-boiled Jackie Collins, with a shark in every swimming pool and a gun concealed in every enhanced cleavage. McNally makes bizarre company, peppering his talk with French phrases as if he were taking us on a language course. His father is always mon pere, McNally the fils; meals consist of caneton a l'orange, creme caramel and lashings of pommes frites. But as the story barrels along, you stop noticing these quirks. The ratio of speech to description is high - normally a good sign of a page-turner. And the plot, involving a crime passionnel - unravels a deceptively simple open-and-shut case to reveal familiar webs of playboy deceit, greed and hypocrisy under the Caribbean sun. It balances its pretensions with wit - a perfect read if you can manage a complete suspension of disbelief.

Moscow: The Beautiful And The Damned

Nick Holdsworth

(Andre Deutsch, 9.99)

Holdsworth, a British journalist who has lived and worked in Russia for nine years, quotes a 36-year-old Muscovite who says: "Life in Russia today is lived in a permanent crisis." The words epitomise the feelings of millions of his fellow countrymen, who have lived through one of the most cataclysmic periods of change in their country's turbulent history. There are moving and revealing passages, many echoing the author's belief that people are "more intent on surviving day-by-day than forming coherent collective actions against the body blows of an economy characterised by unpredictability, racketeering and rampant political corruption".

A Foreign Country

Francine Stock

(Vintage, 6.99)

This slim work, which earned its writer a nomination for the Whitbread First Novel award, is a thought-provoking read. In 1940 Daphne, working in a junior role at the War Office, finds herself interviewing some of the Italian emigrs rounded up in dawn raids following Mussolini's declaration of war. She has to decide their politics and their fates. Hundreds of the Italians are deported to Canada on a ship which is torpedoed, leaving few survivors. A lifetime later Daphne finds that her decisions on who should be interned, decisions she made under pressure and with a great sense of duty, come back to haunt her.

Beyond The Final Whistle

John Boyers

(Hodder and Stoughton, 7.99)

Some people think that football is a matter of life and death, but it's more important than that. Manchester United club chaplain, John Boyers, gets to grips with a game that dominates many people's lives with an almost religious fervour. He sees the world of the dedicated football fan and the world of religion as not so far apart and is convinced that football has a lot to teach us about life and gritty commitment to what we believe in.

Short Change

Julia Notaro

(Pocket Books, 5.99)

In place of the simpering, confused thirtysomething heroines swarming in the wake of Bridget Jones and Ali McBeal, Julia Notaro gives us Lisa Soames, an Essex girl making it as a dealer in a London investment bank. Despite her job, Lisa knows next to nothing about the world she is entering. Without any understanding of economics, never having read the Financial Times, she has to depend on her savage wit to get by. This can get a little wearing as the one-liners slot mechanically into place, but she remains an engaging character.