Book Review

A furniture salesman with a business degree, a signed photo of Lena Horne, and a cousin who cannot stop volunteering him for robberies. Whitehead's Harlem novel is a heist story, a social history and a very funny book about the price of respectability.

James Islington takes a holiday from epic fantasy and comes back with a lean, funny, genuinely nasty cyberpunk thriller about a contract killer who has been engineered not to care. Fast, inventive, and over far too quickly.

Two American newlyweds are lifted off a Normandy road on the fifth day of their honeymoon. Both families pay two million dollars. Only the bride comes home. Grisham's fortieth novel has no courtroom, no lawyer-hero and no verdict, and it is angrier than anything he has written in a decade.

A bodyguard is shot on a Tuscan doorstep and left with a misspelled note signed by a Swedish billionaire nobody can find. The second We Solve Murders novel sends Steve, Amy and Rosie after a man that half of Europe insists does not exist.

In August 1978 an eighteen-year-old golf prodigy drives a ball through a torn practice net and kills a caddy fifteen yards away. Bohjalian's twenty-sixth novel is her memoir, written at sixty-six, and it is far angrier about class and older men than it is about golf.