Hot Six is Janet Evanovich's sixth Stephanie Plum opus, and it is as creatively uproarious as the other five. As fans will know, Stephanie is a bounty hunter, working out of Trenton, New Jersey for her lunatic cousin, Vinnie. Surrounded by an over-the-top cast of weirdos, Stephanie is about one hairpin short of a full coiffure, and the difficulties she gets herself into have more to do with her ineptness at her job than ill-luck or bad rolls of the dice. In this present adventure, she is attempting to help her fellow bounty hunter, Ranger, shake off a murder charge and find the real killer. But plot is not our author's strong point; rather she excels at creating farcical set-pieces, with the ever-more-prone-to-disaster Stephanie central to each one. Rivalling her in the off-the-wall stakes is her Granny Mazur, a formidable old lady who carries a gun, has pink hair and drinks gin as if it is going out of fashion. There is also the large Afro-American helpmate, Lula of the sassy mouth; the vice cop Joe Morelli, with whom Stephanie has an on-again, off-again love affair; the spaced-out Mooner and Dougie; and Bob, the psychologically-challenged dog. Don't take my word for it: if you want a roller-coaster spin through fantasy-land New Jersey, rush out and buy Hot Six as quickly as you can.
Lawrence Block has followed up his novel Hit Man, featuring killer-for-hire Keller, with a second volume about the same guy, Hit List (Orion, £16.99 in UK). Strangely enough, he paints him as a sympathetic character: killing is just a job, like any other, and Keller is prone to the same set of insecurities as anybody else. If you can get over this initial stumbling block (pun intended) then you'll find the novel quite entertaining. More a series of interconnected episodes than a continuous narrative, the mortar holding the book together is the dialogue between our protagonist and Dot, the middle-aged woman who sends him out on his work. Block's strength has always been the manner in which he makes his characters talk - as an example of this, please seek out his When the Sacred Ginmill Closes, one of the best novels of this genre ever written - and in the surreal chat between Keller and Dot he is at his best. The plot itself is slight: another hit man trying to put Keller out of commission so that he will have the killing fields to himself. Needless to say, our hero (?) survives, to continue ridding the world of useless bits of human baggage. If you liked Richard Stark's series of novels about the cold-blooded criminal, Parker, then you'll also cotton on to killer Keller.
In complete contrast is Ruth Dudley Edwards's The Anglo-Irish Murders (HarperCollins, £16.99 in UK). This is the latest in her series featuring the Margaret Rutherford-like Baroness Troutbeck and her young sidekick, Robert Amiss. Called in to chair a conference on Anglo-Irish relations, the formidable Jack, as she is familiarly known, is bound to cause ructions in an already ruction-prone situation, and this she duly does. Poor Amiss, of course, is caught in the middle, and when one of the delegates takes a header off the battlements of Moycoole Castle in Co Mayo, where the conference is being held, the scene becomes a case of Babylon revisited. Edwards takes great glee in swiping at the sensibilities of all parties involved in the seminar: nationalists, unionists, civil servants, politicians from North, South and from across the water all come in for a drubbing. In the process, the murder plot takes somewhat of a back seat, but all threads are drawn together in the end. The lampooning of the Irish may not be to all tastes, but taken on the level of broad satire it can be just about swallowed, and there is no doubt that many bull's-eyes are scored in the midst of the banter. Recommended, but to be taken with a pinch of salt.
Flight Of The Storks (Harvill Press, £9.99 in UK) by Jean-Christophe Grange, translated from the French by Ian Monk, is a big, old-fashioned adventure story that moves through Switzerland, Bulgaria, Africa and India to a kibbutz in Israel. The hero is Louis Antioch, who is hired by a wealthy Swiss ornithologist to solve the mystery of why so many storks have disappeared on their return migration from Africa to northern Europe. His initial, seemingly innocuous investigation leads to a world-wide conspiracy involving the smuggling of South African diamonds and a consequent reign of terror. Written in purple prose that suits this tale of derring-do, the book will tickle your fancy, if not your brain cells.
James Patterson writes a particularly grisly type of thriller which, I have to admit, is not to my taste at all. His latest, Roses Are Red (Headline, £16.99 in UK), continues in this vein, with lingering descriptions of rapes, blood-letting and butchery. The protagonist here is black detective Alex Cross, a man with dark fears of his own, and here he is investigating a series of bank robberies carried out by the usual devious psychopath. The resolution is left open-ended, so it's likely that Cross and his nemesis will return. I may not like the books, but the fact that they all end up on the bestseller lists means that millions do.
Michael Painter is a writer and critic