The Paperbackers

A clever serial killer sends verse in mail,somethings rotten in the Kalahari and a girl finds her American dream.

Its not just Dave Gurneys last name that makes him so well-suited to his job,catching serial killers,with the NYPD,in Think of a Number by John Verdon Penguin,Rs 299; its also his hynotised fascination with them,and his visceral,almost unseemly understanding of how they work. This stalks him to his idyllic Delaware County farmhouse,where he spends an uneasy retirement with his wife Madeleine,following their sons death.

First,Gurney attends an Art Appreciation course on his wifes insistence,and comes away with the creepy hobby of making photorealistic impressions of psychopaths hes nabbed,and spends hours on Photoshop trying to empty their gazes of humanity. When Gurney is contacted by an old schoolmate turned self-help guru,whos been receiving threatening verse in the mail,life begins to imitate art,and Gurney finds himself on the trail of a twisted,clever serial killer,with unsavoury hobbies of his own: walloping his victims headless with a whisky bottle,and leaving a crime scene filled with clues ritual elements like flowers,verse,footprints,hidden messages that lead cops nowhere.

In the Kalahari,though,walloped bodies dont attract cops,but carrion like the happy hyenas that game rangers find feasting on the remains of a certain Goodluck Tinubu in a tourist camp in northern Botswana in a deadly Trade by Michael Stanley Hachette,Rs 295. The twist: Goodluck turns out to have died once before,during the Rhodesian War. This is where Detective David Kubu hippopotamus in Setswana Bengu comes in. The tenacious,merry Bengu with a taste for food,wine,and florid African XXXL shirts will appeal to admirers of Alexander McCall Smiths Precious Ramotswe. But he treads darker,grislier ground; uncovering ugly truths in the landlocked region,including inter-tribal brutalities,poachers,plunderers and corrupt politicians.

From Botswana to Brooklyn. Girl in Translation by Jean Kwok Penguin,Rs 450 is set in the cold,vermin-ridden apartment of young Kimberly Chang,where the only source of heat is a rusty old oven,and roaches lick at everything with long waving antennae. Kimberly and her mother,incapable of speaking a word of English,have been brought to New York from Hong Kong by Kimberlys Aunt Paula,a sweatshop manager of near-caricatural evil,who cheats them into being in continual debt to her.

While her tubercular,gifted pianist mother spends hours steam-pressing skirts for 1.50 cents each in a Chinatown sweatshop,Kimberly turns out to be a genius,and wins a scholarship to a swanky private school. Here,shes mocked for her crude,homemade clothes and poor English,and attracts the jealousy and spite of her peers,some of whom even try to sabotage her success. But all this deprivation and heartache only serves to spring-load the novel for redemptive uplift. You can rest easy in the assurance that our now lithe and beautiful Sweatshop Millionaire will,by the end of the book,have found fortune,fame and a gorgeous,rich boy to swoon off into the Min-hat-ton sunset with.