The Shadow Player, by Rose Doyle (Town House, £6.99)

When a woman with two children turns up on your doorstep on the day after New Year's and tells you that a) the father of your child is dead and b) that she is his widow, you might guess it's going to be a pretty rotten year. For Norah Hopkins, however, it turns out to be even worse than that as she becomes enmeshed in a chain of events which eventually leads to the kidnap of her daughter by a Dublin criminal gang. In her fifth novel Rose Doyle spins what is, with a couple of eyebrow-raising exceptions, a plausible yarn, and the pages turn with pleasing effortlessness towards a happy ending.