William Boyd brings together two seemingly disparate groups, the high-stakes, global pharmaceutical business and the contract supply of demobbed military experts, an unusual and intriguing combination.

The catalyst for this amalgamation is Adam Kindred, who innocently finds himself in the wrong place at the wrong time and becomes the chief suspect in a murder. Having only just returned to London for a job interview after many years abroad, Adam knows no-one and has nowhere to run to, and it quickly becomes apparent that he does have to run as he is not only being hunted by the police, but also by the real killer. With seemingly few alternatives, he decides to get lost by joining the world of London's homeless.

This is a pretty good story line but it never really takes off. Apart from Kindred's circumstances, and his ability to remain undetected, he actually does little else for the story other than be a potential target and bringer of doom. The police wander around the edges of the main story but never really get involved, other than as somewhat unbelievable romantic interest, no meaningful investigation ever really gets going. So we are left with the killer, and this equally unbelievable, dog-owning psychopath also fails to set the story alight.

There are some solid if predictable characters here, well drawn and potential hooks for our emotions but unexploited, and there are also too many bystanders who are supposed to be key players but fail to develop. It's a commuter's read but little else.

We all know that life in England four hundred and fifty years ago was a somewhat different experience to ours today but we generally choose not to dwell on the seemier sides of that existence. C.J Sansom, however, makes sure we understand only too well that sewage management was a luxury few could enjoy, life on London's streets was an unwashed affair and clothes literally hung on backs until they rotted and fell away. Beyond that the wealth divide was enormous, street crime endemic and it is surprising that any sort of social order was possible at all.

In amongst all that, the embryo of a caring society is embodied in Matthew Shardlake, Sergeant Matthew Shardlake now since his promotion to the Court of Requests, liberally referred to as "crookback" by those around him who occupy a yet higher social position and are therefore able to insult their inferiors. Matthew is our guide to Tudor life and principal investigator, reluctantly, on behalf of Archbishop Cranmer, of a series of brutal murders that threaten the King's pursuance of a possible sixth wife, Lady Catherine Parr.

Matthew is again ably abetted by his sidekick Barak who, like Matthew, is late of Cromwell's coterie but unlike Matthew is more street than court. Meanwhile, Matthew once more finds himself in his least favourite circumstances, those of the Royal hinterland where politics and one-upmanship are rife and he has to use all his mental agility just to retain his position.

Revelation is a credible tale based around the religious extremism of the times, something we are out of touch with in today's secular society but which was literally a matter of life and death then. There is one masterful moment when Cranmer ponders the horrific experience of one murder victim who is burnt alive when he, himself, has sent many to such a fate. Oh such is the anguish of high office.

At it's core this murder-mystery is soundly crafted and the cast of characters broad and well-painted, so that we are given ample opportunity to exercise our own sleuthing credentials. Alongside this, the day-to-day development of our principal characters and their lives, Matthew and Barak, once again delivers a parallel what-happens-next story-line that keeps us turning the page.

Revelation is pacy and evocative and, picking just one aspect that makes me glad I'm alive in today's times, I will never take the drainage system for granted, ever again.

Mario is eighteen years old, a prospective law student, or so his family would have it, aspiring writer, as he would have it, and he works for Panamericana, a local radio station in 1950's Lima, where he and his colleagues re-jig news bulletins from other sources for Panamericana listeners. Enter one Pedro Camacho, Bolivian writer of serials, who arrives at Panamericana, purloins Mario's typewriter and sets himself up in a cubbyhole from where he begins producing soap-operas that quickly establish a new and rising audience for Radio Panamericana.

Against this backdrop, Mario begins a relationhip and eventually falls in love with Julia, his divorced "aunt" by marriage to a relative, who is fourteen years his elder and clearly not averse to the attentions of a much younger admirer. This is the story of their courtship.

Vargas Llosa interweaves the developing relationship with a series of short stories about local characters and bizarre tales, whilst also documenting the gradual descent into mania of Pedro Camacho, whose parallel serials come to overlap and become so confused that characters die in one and are resurrected in another.

Llosa's style perfectly matches the radio serial era he portrays, moving the story on episodically, building tension, whilst continually stepping aside to recount another stand-alone snippet of a story, before returning you to the main theme. With our latter-day exposure to television soap operas we can relate to this format immediately, establishing the backdrop and characters in our minds so the humour shines through, as do the real family tensions that come later.

Here is an easy style to read, but the craftsmanship rewards savouring each chapter to the full. You could skip through from beginning to end in a single session, or take the Panamericana approach and serialise your reading. I suspect, though, that the periods between episodes will be short.

I found this a contrary book, I don't think it really works as a novel but then, if not, what is it. What it is about is poets and madness and love, and ideals versus reality, it regales us with insightful turns of phrase and occasionally is itself a very poetic work.

Adam Foulds offers us a series of brief encounters with his characters and their situations. Matthew Allen is a family man and doctor who runs an asylum whilst John Clare is a poet of doubful mind and his patient. Patients seem to be voluntary admissions and submit themselves to such restraints and controls as Allen sees appropriate. Allen seems to be an enlightened doctor who for example, reluctantly resorts to a locked-down regime only when necessary. Patients who can be trusted are allowed an exit key as long as they return on time. If they don't, their punishment is a day or two of solitary confinement. Allen, meanwhile, is not so good at the finances of his operation and is in difficulty with his creditors. Creditors include the Tennyson family, which allows Faulds to expand his cast to include yet another poet, none other than Alfred himself, who has invested because his brother is a patient.

Apart from Allen and Clare, and possibly Allen's immediate family, I found the other characters to be charicatures and none more so than Alfred Tennyson; to pick another well-known poet as an irrascible creditor seemed entirely unnecessary, any wealthy anonymous character could have filled the part, and to chose Tennyson seemed indulgent and a distraction, surely our poet of interest is John Clare.

As a recounting of Clare's period of madness, the book seemed to work very well; Faulds does have the gift of portraying the world in a series of brief interludes through the stuttering mental experiences of someone who is not of right mind. This somewhat disjointed approach succeeds as a mimic of such a disjointed mind. When carried through to the rest of the characters, however, this approach serves to disrupt the tale and prevent any cohesive thread developing. I found it hard to follow any particular story line and when, eventually, we home in on the finale based upon Clare's journey home, it all seemed too simplistic and contrived, no matter it might have been factually based.

Enjoyable though the prose was, and beautifully written and imagined as many of the episodes were, overall I am left wondering just what it is I have read.

Having just completed reading The Seige of Krishnapur, I am finding it difficult to concentrate on my next book as my thoughts keep drifting back to J. G. Farrell's captivating tale of the Indian Mutiny. That, for me, is testament enough to the subtle power of Farrell's seeping characterisation and boys-own story-telling that delivers a very human story.

The history of the Indian Mutiny is well-enough known that Farrell does not waste our time explaining it, or the extent of it, other than by passing reference to mutiny-related events unfolding generally, rather he focusses straightway on his principal characters to be, who are they and what is the essence of their lives pre-Mutiny. In this way Farrell prepares the ground for his in-depth examination of how those characters initally respond to, and subsequently deal with, the tortuous, drawn out experience of the seige.

Farrell's story-telling is anything but tortuous and drawn out, however, as he skilfully compresses a period of months into a series of episodes that portray the inexorable passage to physical starvation, the abandonment of Victorian sensibilities, graphically portrayed in the lost cause of personal hygeine, and explore what individuals will, when pushed to confront impending death, consider to be their own bottom line.

Farrell deconstructs, piece by piece, the edifice of Victorian life in India, built around a social class structure to rival any caste system. Some recognise early the reality that eveyone is in the same boat, others find it impossible to accept and fight to the end to preserve some element of a completely redundant distinction.

Our guide through this collapse is Mr Hopkins, The Collector, the administrative head of this district, who immediately accepts his responsibility to show leadership and takes charge of the developing situation as he invites the ex-pat and at-risk communities into the relative safety of the Residency, from where he will offer all the protection he can and see out the seige. At first the incumbents are defending a small campus, but this is slowly reduced by attack after attack until the survivors are penned into the last-remaining defendable building. Circumstances and beliefs alike are reduced to a core, there is nowhere else to retreat to.

Remarkably, Farrell manages to inject pace, heroism and humour into the story as well as asking some serious moral questions, which all helps to explain why I am still thinking of it.

Ian Kershaw analyses ten decisions taken in the early stages of the second world war and, in most cases, reaches the conclusion that there really was no real choice after all, that for a variety of reasons the path chosen was inevitable. Alongside that, Kershaw clearly shows that it was so often the will of an individual that held sway and made the final choice, though not always for rational reasons.

Churchill stubbornly and calculatingly decided that one might as well go down fighting Hitler as capitulate, and he persuaded his contemporaries who were minded to seek terms by using arguments built up over time and by using the course of events unfolding on the continent to conclude that no real alternative existed. Mussolini on the other hand, used little if any rational argument when he elected to invade Greece, indeed, Kershaw makes it quite clear that he was simply driven by hubris and a childs pugilistic response to always coming off second best, in this case to Hitler, in making his fateful decision.

What Kershaw does superbly is to explain why these decisions were so momentous in the longer term, just why they determined the fate of their maker and others. Hitler's invasion of Russia, his opening up of a second front, was the key to his ultimate defeat, although Zukov's persuading Stalin to stand and fight was clearly a turning point. Meanwhile Roosevelt's decision not to turn his back on Britain inevitably led to the US eventually entering the war in Europe. Perhaps amongst all the episodes the Japanese decision to attack the United States is the most sadly fatalistic. Kershaw's analysis shows that all the Japanese high command knew they could not be victorious in such an encounter, that ultimately their resources were simply insufficeint to overcome the wealth of America and that such a course of action must fail, and yet they went ahead anyway because the alternative, in their judgement to be relegated to an also-ran on the world's stage, was unacceptable.

Kershaw's style is methodical, he makes the case for examining each decision and then sets about analysing the background, context, individuals involved and the options, before explaining why a particular path was chosen. At times this becomes a little repetitive, but it does serve to reinforce the key points.

One case examines a decision that was not taken for militaristic purposes, the anihilation of the Jews by the Nazis. Possibly the most momentous and certainly the most horrific of them all, this cemented a judgement in history that towers over all the others. Kershaw's step-by-step approach to the inevitability of the "final solution" is a chilling portrayal of how, by exploiting circumstances and personal prejudice, a modern nation can be persuaded that the wholesale extermination of a race of people is a justifiable act.

It's Greenham Common, Trafalgar Square politics, the angry, academic left fomenting student protest and failing to take the electorate along but spawning the death of comfy Conservatism and the birth of widespread political change. Stalin simply eliminated the educated classes, the UK let them morph into capitalist mercenaries on the one hand and New Labour on the other. Meanwhile, domestic circumstances seem to have changed little in the last forty years and there is much here that is repeated today.

Tom Martin is a brilliant, left-wing, thorn-in-the-side-of-authority academic who lives with his family in one of those four-storey, Victorian London houses, beloved then of Oxbridge graduates and today's blue-red politicians, that were affordable then but now cost a couple of million to buy. Tom runs an open-door house, frequented by like-minded radicals, students and general hangers-on of modest intellect, whilst he is usually locked away writing his latest opus and his family, one son, two daughters and beautiful wife number two, get on with the daily task of living. Through that open door walks Karen North, student - come researcher - come proof reader - come au pair - come trouble. Things don't, hoever, develop quite as one might think, there is more to Benn's story than simple sex and betrayal, far from it really, other than that which goes on in people's minds but fails to materialise in practice. What Benn depicts beautifully are the deep relationships and dependencies that build between various couples and how the individuals involved often only really acknowledge their personal significance long after the experience.

The story tracks a formulaic rising through the ranks of a young, energetic, politically-charged activist, who wants to become someone and be thought of as making a difference, but with little real substance behind them; Karen North does not intend to become an unsung hero. In her wake she leaves a trail of naive, inadvertant destruction; it is not deliberate or malicious, just unfortunate. If you did not live through the seventies and eighties this may all seem a little banal, but if you did then Benn's writing will transport you back to all sorts of memories, newspaper headlines and late-night parties where one ended up sitting on the floor, quite possibly drunk, and fervently arguing the merits and demerits of extreme left and liberal causes.

Benn's style is both languid, wonderfully accessible and incisively crafted. Enjoy.

Parot takes us back to pre-revolution Paris, a time when an ageing Louis XV still commanded the country, although I doubt he took as much interest in France at large as he did in events in the capital.
Nicholas le Floch is a star investigator who possesses the necessary skills and tact to be assigned the more complex and politically sensitive cases; he also happens to come from noble stock, hence a thriving personal relationship with Louis and a background of service in royal quarters whence his reputation has been secured. No doubt this is covered in ealier novels of the series, but this was my first.

The story starts with a tumultuous celebration for the people of Paris culminating in a fantastic firework display that goes horribly wrong. In the aftermath, Floch is assigned to name and shame those responsible and, in so doing, uncovers murder and a bizarre set of circumstances in a merchants household. The rest follows a standard pattern of investigation leading to the denoument that takes place in the formality of a Paris courtroom. In one sense, Floch is a Poirot-like character and the style of narrative not unlike that of Agatha Christie, especially the final stage-managed expose . However, the setting is evocative of a bustling capital bursting at the seams, where the various communities of haves and have-nots co-reside with mutual loathing and mob rule is never more than a stopped breath away.

The translation sometimes lapses, but that just adds to the sense that it is not by Agatha Christie. It is amusing and entertaining and delivers a suitably intriguing case for the reader to unravel. Worthwhile and I shall read more of the series.

Chatwin's skill in conveying the experience of his travels, the breath of daily existence, is masterfully portrayed in The Songlines. The Songlines are the traditional pathways across Australia followed by aboriginals as they literally sing their way through their native country, passing from one tribal homeland to another, acknowleding the occupation rights of each whilst, in effect, securing safe passage by recounting their own ancestry. Chatwin exposes both the helpers and do-gooding hinderers of the Aborignal cause; those who inflate their own self esteem on the pretence of protecting them; those who simply exploit them for financial gain and those who really do have their best interests at heart. Meanwhile, in the background and threatening everything, is the potentially self-destructive nature of the aboriginals themselves.

Overlayed on Chatwin's inaugural excursion into Australia's unforgiving outback, experiencing the perils of simple survival in a land where nature and tribal custom override any outside influence, The Songlines is a wonderful evocation of a life few of us will have the opportunity to personally experience. The only slight negative for me was Chatwin's spell of reminiscing his travel notes from previous journeys. At first insightful into Chatwin and his life, this went on too long and became a little tedious.

Having recently read Remembering Babylon by David Malouf, Chatwin helps build a solid picture of life on another planet.

The Roy Grace novels have been excellent and Dead Tomorrow has another terrific story line, but there are clear signs of trouble ahead if Peter James wants this series to continue with style.
More and more authors are structuring their novels towards an audience they believe have the attention span of the proverbial goldfish. Much as television has done in the likes of "24", where each scene is cut so short as to cover the absolute minimum necessary to move the story forward before cutting to another thread of activity. Before long, the chapters of a novel will occupy a single page. Peter James is going down this path and the effect is detrimental in a number of areas. Dead Tomorrow takes the first one hundred and fifty pages before one gets any idea what the story line is. From then on we flit constantly between one thread and another with James clearly of the opinion that this somehow helps keep the vaious story aspects alive whilst building tension. It doesn't. As became apparent to ITV after their initial attempts at interspersing Formula 1 action with adverts, the break in concentration simply deflates any tension build-up, and the same is true here.

On another front, James needs to get to grips with his Roy Grace character. James constructed a strong background for Grace which helps to explain his character and relationships, but the inability to deal with his missing wife, for example, is simply lazy and tiring for a forgiving reader. If Grace fails to move on so will this series.

This is an over-long, still enjoyable read, but James needs to work harder on the next one.