Papering over the cracks

William Heffernan's latest novel Cityside takes us inside the pressure chamber of a New York newspaper in the post-Watergate era and further into the heart of a corrupt medical system with all the confidence you'd expect from a three-time Pulitzer Prize nominee.

There's a reassuring predictability to some of the characters and the plotting, as if you've already met the world-weary yet virtuous reporter and the concerned Puerto Rican mother of a dying boy, but while some of the period scene setting seems laboured and the prose is no poetry, it hurtles along at a cracking pace.

Fitting for a novel where the main character's mantra is that it's all about the story.