The Paperbackers

A look at brisk sellers and quick reads. Murder makes pit stops in a South African reserve,an LA McMansion and central London.

Tom Furey is a protection officer whose high-profile wards have included a plethora of politicians,a former prime minister,a couple of European monarchs,African dictators,and an Arabian prince or two. On an assignment in Kruger National Park to protect British defence minister Robert Greeves,he wakes up with a blinding hangover,to find a nameless wantons bare breasts rising and falling on the bed beside him,and a puddle of blood and spinal fluid where Greeves ought to have been.

Silent Predator by Tony Park Quercus,Rs 250 begins with Furey joining forces with his shapely South African counterpart to pursue Greeves abductors,a search which takes them across grasslands the colour of molten gold,right up to the coast of Mozambique. The investigation also takes him back to London where he leads an operation to surveil a few Pakistani gentlemen and their involvement in a third world thug trifecta: prostitutes,illegal workers,a bomb maker or two. It ends,as things in such books always do,with an explosion.

Adrenaline by Jeff Abbott Hachette,Rs 295,meanwhile,begins with an explosion. At the start of this Hollywood-ready adrenaline pumper,hunky CIA operative and daredevil parkour practitioner Sam Capra is called out of his London office by his pregnant wife,halfway through a PowerPoint presentation hes giving on a Rottweiler-faced Russian of epic badness. As soon as he hits the sidewalk,he sees his office explode,spattering out his colleagues in halves,and his wife being whisked off in an Audi. He wakes up in a prison cell,and the rest of it is the high-octane stuff that DiCaprios career is made of.

Jonathan Kellermans Evidence Hachette,Rs 295,on the other hand,is the pacy,smart stuff his own Edgar Award-winning career is made of. In it,homicide cop Milo Sturgis and psychologist Alex Delaware come together to investigate the grisly in flagrante murder of a couple in a half-finished turret of a Los Angeles McMansion. The dead man found in this sick parody of passion turns out to be a green architect,Desmond Backer,who was,as a less than affectionate colleague puts it,highly motivated toward maximal screwing. This trait,as Sturgis and Delaware find,earned Backer a Kill me sign which got bigger and brighter with every new acquaintance they questioned,with a cast of potential killers including but not restricted to an ex-lover,her cuckolded husband,an eccentric ex-colleague and a disgruntled,dissolute prince from an oil-rich island in Indonesia.