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MacLeod, Charlotte

The Balloon Man

New York, The Mysterious Press (Warner Books). 280 pp. $23.00.

The sleuths are art detective Max Bittersohn and his wife Sarah Kelling, solving cases despite their brilliant (he has a Jewish grandmother) three-year-old son Davy.

Sarah Kelling is planning a wedding. On the big day the clans arrive, the weather is perfect, but unforeseen events (nearly) mar the festivities. A hot air balloon lands on the wedding tent (with a squashed corpse beneath it), and the long-lost Kelling rubies reappear among the wedding gifts. Little Davy is kidnapped. Max vanishes and reappears on a rock at sea, from which he is rescued by Tweeters Arbuthnot (who has a pet puffin for whom he must fashion a prosthetic beak) and his seaplane. The landscape is obscured by a gigantic smoke bomb. Theonia, the psychic cousin, reads the tea leaves and makes predictions. Other members of the family are zanier still.

Into this account of marriage, mayhem and merriment, Charlotte MacLeod weaves a plot and a revelation.

The plot is the solution of the murder mystery and the story of the family jewels, and their reappearance, told with great hilarity. We are also let into Sarah Kelling's past. Her first elderly husband and his autocratic mother had hurtled over a cliff into the sea. Her first marriage lay like a shadow between her and the man she loved and married, he was fed up with hearing about it, and she couldn't resist bringing it up (it often sprang up unexpectedly). In this book, she finally says good-bye to her first husband, "I think you take your chances as they come and do what you can with what you get. Some people get more, some get less because they're afraid to hold out their plates for what they really want." How and why it happens to her is the revelation.

Charlotte MacLeod was born in Canada and is now a naturalized US citizen. She writes and edits mystery anthologies. She lives in rural Maine. Her books reveal her prescription for a happy marriage.

Margolin, Phillip

Ties That Bind

London, Time Warner Books, 2003, 342 pp. £17.99.

Your choice is between eliminating someone who wants to ruin you and your family, and protecting your family. Do you want to trade the future of everyone you hold dear for the life of a whore.

Jon Dupre was tall, tanned, handsome, and muscular. He had grown up wealthy and pampered. He kept a stable of whores. He was thought to have killed one of them at least. There was overwhelming evidence that he had killed Senator Tarvis, a presidential candidate. He stood accused of having killed his own lawyer, done it in front of witnesses. It seemed that the only question now was, how was the death penalty to be administered. But why did he kill his own defence lawyer, the only man who could save him from being found guilty of the murder of Senator Travis.

The only lawyer courageous enough to defend him is Amanda Jaffe. Amanda Jaffe has a dark secret and she is talked into undertaking the defence as a way of facing her fears. It is either that, or having to give up criminal practice.

But the reluctant prosecutor, Tim Kerrigan, has even darker secrets that he is trying to hide. Not only is he a reluctant prosecutor, he is a reluctant senatorial candidate and he has to win this case because the publicity will ensure his candidacy. There is also the temptation that however badly he has behaved, he could become a United States senator and do good for a great number of people

In fact, apart from a cracking good plot, what is so interesting is not just the personalities, but that each one has a secret agenda, and then each one also has a flaw which makes it difficult for them to operate effectively. There are also the fathers (of Kerrigan and Jaffe) with their own agendas and flaws.

Murder and mayhem and enough corrupt politicians to fill both chambers of Congress. Are the FBI the good guys or the bad guys? The denouement is exceptional.

No surprise that Phillip Margolin was a prominent criminal defence attorney. His "The Last Innocent Man" was made into a film.

Masters, Anthony

The Good and Faithful Servant

London, Constable. 203 pp. £16.99

Freddie and Vivian Cole specialize in protection, gaming scams, motor trade fraud and robbery, but they won't deal in drugs. They consider themselves villains with morals. Freddie has a son (from another liaison) called Eric, ambitious to be a master criminal. His relations with his parents are not too good. He is thought to have turned their beloved younger son onto drugs.

Daniel Boyd, formerly with the CID, was at the wheel of his car when it crashed and wiped out his entire family. He wants to forget his past. His superiors are glad to oblige. Why doesn't he assume a completely new identity and a new life by infiltrating the criminal Cole family! Amongst the intriguing features of this book is how his old personality and life keep on asserting themselves even though this endangers his new identity.

Cole becomes bodyguard and chauffeur to Vivian "Aunt Vi" Cole. The Coles' home is ripped apart by a bomb and she is killed. He feels he has failed again to preserve the life of someone he was supposed to safeguard and had become quite fond of (south London criminals are supposed to be immensely lovable). He now has a personal and emotional stake in what had started as a job in which to lose himself.

Sub-titled Insider One this is the first in a projected series featuring Daniel Boyd by Anthony Masters who writes for adults and children.

Meltzer, Brad

The Millionaires

London, Coronet Books (Hodder & Stoughton), 2002. 481 pp. £ 6.99.

In life, there're only two perfect - and I mean perfect - crimes where you can't be caught: One is where you're killed, which isn't too great an option. And the other is when no one knows that a crime took place.

Under New York law, when a customer doesn't use an account for five years, the money gets turnd over to he state. Greene & Greene is a private New York bank. One of the customers has died, leaving three million dollars in his account. This money has to be turned over to the state. If it disappears, nobody would notice.

Charlie and Oliver Caruso are two brothers who work for this bank. Neither are getting anywhere in the bank. They are permanently broke. They are tired of pampering the filthy rich customers of the bank. And there are colossal medical bills to be paid for their mother. Why not take the money! A victimless crime!

So they do and prepare themselves for a life of luxury. Oliver is the nervous one and always sweats bullets. Charlie is full of wisecracks.

There is, of course, many a slip twixt the cup and the lip and now the slips begin to pile up. There is a security officer called Shep and they do not know that he can read every e-mail they send out, and every telephone they make to steal the money. Shep suggests they go into partnership. The secret service step in. Shep is shot before their eyes. The stolen three million become three hundred million and more. Stealing three million didn't seem like a big thing, but three hundred million and more is more than the brothers bargained for when they got their caper under way.

The brothers' resolve is tested, as well as their ability to survive against all odds, so that often they (and you) wander, who are the good guys and who are the bad guys? Their mother is enchanting and you'll wish you, too, had a mother like that! The end comes as a total surprise, but it does make sense.

A story to cheer up a long journey, a winter's evening, days at the beach. Plus a goodly lesson on how to hide money, which the author maintains is as easy as pie.

A law school graduate, luckily for us, Brad Meltzer became a successful author before he practised any law.

Mosley, Walter

Gone Fishin'

London, FIve Star Paperback, Serpent's Tail. 159 pp. £5.99.

Once upon a time, when I was an undergraduate, we had to study the picaresque novel. In the classic picaresque novel, a social parasite satirizes the society he has exploited. The novel is usually in the form of a journey. At the end of each leg of the journey, the narrator has a revelation about his own self.

The picaresque novel was eventually joined to the murder mystery and this is as perfect an example as you will find anywhere.

Mouse is the rogue. He intends to marry EttaMae and is on his way to convince her father to support him in a style he would like to become accustomed to. He takes as his driver Easy Rawlins, whose life he saved once. East Rawlins is the narrator. The background is black Texas. The only relief from the drudgery of life is sex, at times hilarious, drinking, violence and spirituality.

As they travel, Easy Rawlins, the narrator, realizes that Mouse not only interferes in everyone's life, including that of Easy himself, but does so with fatal consequences. Mouse is a conman. Sweet tongue and no morals. Why worry about the destination, asks Easy, when the road is full of vipers? And if Mouse has endured, having married EttaMae, maybe he's fat now and working as a cook in a hotel. Whatever gratitude Easy felt to Mouse for saving his life evaporates.

On the one hand the book is very funny (Easy is bedded by a witch he is unable to physically resist). On the other, there is a growing sense of doom.

Easy realizes that the only way he will get away from Mouse and the life he is leading is to learn how to read and write. Otherwise he will always be in thrall to the likes of Mouse.

He learns to read and write, survives the US army and now tells us his touching story.

Peter Ayrton of Serpent's Tail had the brilliant idea of bringing out genre and literary fiction in a cheap paperback format. Walter Mosley is a New Yorker.