Those Bones Are Not My Child. By Toni Cade Bambara. ( The Women's Press, £7.99 in UK)

This book opens with a mother's discovery that her teenage boy is missing: it develops into a multilayered examination of race and class issues in the US, and of official incompetance and cover-up. The author spent 12 years researching the events it recreates; the deaths of more than 40 black children in Atlanta in the early 1980s, and the campaigns waged by their distraught parents to have the cases linked and investigated. At the centre of the maelstrom is Marzala Spencer: the novel traces her frantic search for her son. Passionate without ever stooping to sensationalism, this is a deeply troubling voyage to the heart of the American nightmare.