James Patterson is one of a small tribe of thriller-writers currently trading under the name of Patterson or Connolly; his disposable thriller-lites top charts then turn up as forgettable movies. In 1st to Die (Headline Feature, £16.99) he is writing in drag, a fairly excruciating exercise (and unnecessary, as there are plenty of second-rate female authors to do the job). The recipe: take one female cop, stir in a life-threatening illness, counter with solidarity in the form of fellow female professionals on whom she can draw for cocktails and supportive yakking, and the Women's Murder Club is born. To give away the plot of this flaccid exercise is to give away nothing, so here you go: newlyweds bumped off by serial killer; unpublished manuscript about newlyweds being bumped off, et cetera , by top-selling author (psychopathic, bearded); adverse medical diagnosis, cop's affair with partner; cheering medical diagnosis, partner shot; it's the writer after all, despite twists (wife disguising self as husband, complete with beard). This stuff sells; draw your own conclusions. Anyone considering a nom de plume could do worse than Patterson Connolly.
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In the space of three books, John Lawton has overhauled the old toff thriller so beloved of the genre (and Baroness James) and reapplied it to recent British history, from wartime through to the Profumo/Keeler scandal. Riptide (Weidenfeld, £16.99) returns to the Blitz for a comedy of manners in which a US agent is introduced to quaint British ways and a world partly out of Dickens, partly out of H E Bates. The plot is that reliable evergreen, hunt-the-German; strong London Blitz atmosphere, a solid supporting cast (toffs as shits) and a general air of intelligence will, in the long run, give this a better shelf-life than James Patterson.
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Lee Child does franchise and formula. Reacher is the franchise: a laconic Clint Eastwood-type drifter, he is an ex-military cop with a moral code and a soft spot for a quotation. In Echo Burning (Bantam, £9.99) the formula is a Western, confident in application and reassuring in its predictability. Reacher plays reluctant rescuer to a Mexican woman married to a brutal rancher in west Texas, stomping all comers and bullying the bullies. Competent as ever, but this lacks the depth of plotting that distinguished The Visitor .
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The Coins of Judas by Scott McBain (HarperCollins, £9.99) takes one Californian shrink - synonymous with modern scepticism and overreaching - pitches him into the vat marked Faustus , and indulges in trips through the astral planes and dark speculation from the Vatican archives about the fate of said coins. The research and references are of a higher calibre than the plotting. This is no advance on Christopher Marlowe's, which was creaky at best.
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