Paperbacks

Trick of the Dark by Val McDermid. Sphere, £7.99

McDermid’s latest is an enjoyable mystery, despite being let down by an unconvincing ending. Charlie Flint is a likable protagonist whose life is a mess of contradictions. She’s a devoted psychiatrist who’s barred from practising while under investigation for unprofessional conduct. She’s a lesbian who’s happily married to kind, supportive Maria but besotted with flirty, intriguing Lisa. She’s never been particularly keen on college reunions, yet reluctantly obliges a professor by poking around the circumstances of several sudden deaths. The deaths aren’t apparently linked, yet each has made life easier for successful entrepreneur Jay. Coincidence? Trick of the Dark introduces the reader to umpteen fascinating worlds, including psychiatry, mountaineering, insider trading,dot.com start-ups, and Oxford University. A good read for a long journey, or for those nights when you can’t sleep. Kevin Sweeney

Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess. Vintage, £10.99

Readers on the lookout for a big, bold, ambitious and bawdy saga sustained by bravura ambition, ideas, facts and authorial cunning that is not written by James Joyce, need seek no further, the maverick genius Anthony Burgess has a field day in his epic race through the 20th century. It is a much- used device, a novel in which history fleshes out a busy backdrop rich in real-life figures. Yet Burgess triumphs in this yarn, narrated by Kenneth Toomey, an 81 year old homosexual retired novelist who knew any person who ever mattered. Remembered by many as the hot favourite to win the 1980 Booker Prize that unexpectedly went to William Golding's Rites of Passage, as jaws dropped and Burgess sulked, Earthly Powers is a lively and likable extravaganza about sin and spirituality, corruption and fear, told with vicious wit, intelligence and panache by a singular original we have never fully appreciated. Eileen Battersby

Connected: The Amazing Power of Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives by Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler. Harper Press, £9.99

The term "social network" predates Facebook and refers to groups of individuals who are connected by common circumstances, behaviours, and so on. This book analyses the power and influence of a myriad of social networks: networks of voters, of those who smoke and those who quit smoking, of people with contagious illnesses. In fact, the authors find that anything can be contagious within a social network. The effect of hyperdyadic spread among the members of a group (ie my behaviour influencing my friend's friend's friend whom I've never met) is so pervasive that having an indirect social link to a morbidly obese person makes one more likely to become morbidly obese. This evidence that we are slaves to influence is distressing, and the focus on the general as opposed to the individual might remind one of Harry Lime looking down from the big wheel in The Third Man: "Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever?" Colm Farren

John Milton: Life, Work and Thought by Gordon Campbell and Thomas N Corns. Oxford University Press, £14.99

The authors challenge the conventional view of Milton as a committed Puritan, radical from birth. Instead they trace how a young man from a moderate background became radicalised in the cauldron of 17th-century English politics and religion that led to civil war and regicide. They present him as one who was "flawed, self-contradictory, self-serving, arrogant, passionate, ruthless, ambitious and cunning" but also as the greatest polemicist of his age and the writer of the greatest epic poem in English. His public career as a pro-divorce, anti-censorship controversialist and his private life of unhappy family relationships and financial uncertainties are skilfully interwoven in a work of unimpeachable scholarship. He enthusiastically backed Cromwell's campaign in Ireland, but what emerges most clearly is Milton's defiant individualism, part of which was his preference for republicanism. However, he was no democrat and shared the prejudices of his class and age. Brian Maye

Cross Country Murder Song by Philip Wilding. Vintage, £7.99

This debut, really more a collection of tenuously connected short pieces than a fully fleshed-out novel, utilises the ingenious structure of a murder ballad. Each verse chapter races through a sparsely drawn grotesquery from the seemingly ubiquitous dregs of American society while interweaving chorus sections detail the journey of “the driver”, our contemplative yet increasingly psychotic protagonist, as he flees from the murky atrocities left behind in his basement. A success more in idea than execution, the book does contain some beautiful sentences (in its calmer moments) as well as a number of deliciously creepy nuggets sprinkled throughout. Unfortunately Wilding lets himself down by too often relying on schlock violence and gross-out twists. More concerned with hammering home the idea of a landscape of depravity through which this anti-hero traverses than with fleshing out its characters, this is an interesting, but ultimately a failed, experiment. Dan Sheehan