FIRST THOUGHTS

Snow Hill

LONDON, 1936, and rising crime reporter John Steadman receives a tip-off about a murdered policeman, yet the police deny one of their number is even missing. Undeterred, Steadman unearths a potential witness, but he winds up hanging from a meat hook. Steadman, locked in with the corpse by the killer is slowly freezing to death when rescued. Following a second attempt on his life which leaves two others dead, Steadman fakes his own death, going deep undercover in London’s underbelly, into the world of gay prostitution to unravel a scandalous blackmail operation somehow connected to the brutal killer.

Sanderson’s 2002 memoir, Wrong Rooms, attracted rave reviews but his move into fiction isn’t entirely without blemish. The flow of an intriguing plot line based on events rumoured to be true is often arrested by great indigestible gobbets of background information, while the characters are rather one-dimensional.

Chasing Fire

Review: Sandra Mangan

Nora Roberts

Piatkus Books; £13.99, Kindle £6.99

AMERICAN writer Nora Roberts is a name well-known to lovers of romantic fiction.

She’s got more than 190 novels under her belt and many of them have reached the top spot in the best-sellers’ lists.

Chasing Fire sees Roberts cover familiar territory focusing on the burgeoning romance between Rowan Tripp and Gulliver Curry.

What makes it different from her other works is that the love story is set against the backdrop of forest fire-fighting in the mountains of Montana, and focuses on the men and women who risk life and limb as they parachute into the heart of the blaze to battle the flames.

The subject matter is interesting and the romance entertaining, but the added whodunit element of the plot is a little laboured and far too easy to predict.

In a Strange Room

Review Jennifer Hough

Damon Galgut Atlantic Books; €8.99, ebook €6.00

A TROUBLED young traveller searches three continents in this unsettling journey of repressed desire and longing.

The book, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker prize, contains three distinct parts and travels across three continents and is an unsettling tale of an alienated character searching for meaning.

Although it takes a while to get going, once you are inside the narrator’s complex and dark mind, it makes for compelling reading.

The protagonist, a young South African, is intense yet impulsive, angry but placid and it is these internal conflicts which makes following his so fascinating. And although Damon, who has the same name as the author, often comes across as selfish, and self pitying, for some reason, you really want to know how his life pans out.