The thrillers

What to read - and what to avoid. Our essential guide to the page-turners, and the ones to leave in the airport bookstall...

The two best-selling thrillers in the country at the moment are Blow Fly by Patricia Cornwell (Time Warner, £6.99) and Want to Play? by PJ Tracy (Penguin, £6.99). Neither are especially recommendable.

Blow Fly, Cornwell's first Kay Scarpetta novel for several years, is a ludicrous farrago featuring werewolves, multiple serial killers and shamelessly bringing back to life Scarpetta's boyfriend, killed off in a previous episode. Don't go there. Want to Play?, a Richard and Judy selection, is another US multi-serial killer concoction: a murderer starts acting out for real a new computer game ... Too many characters, too many implausibilities.

Better to explore the backlist here: go for Michael Connelly (not his new one, The Narrows, but any before, especially its immediate precursor, The Poet), Jefferson Parker, Robert Crais - or, if you want to be up to date, splash out on the new James Lee Burke in hardback. Beyond the crime procedurals, Pompeii by Robert Harris (Hutchinson, £10.99) is a page-turner - although it's not too hard to guess what happens at the end.

For horror, don't turn to the new Stephen King (The Dark Tower: Song of Susannah, Hodder, £20) but check out one of his many, many fine novels from a few years back - Dreamcatcher (NEL, £6.99), The Shining (NEL, £7.99), The Stand (NEL, £8.99) , it hardly matters. Every multi-language booth on every beachfront around the Mediterranean has at least one bleached-out Stephen King on offer, praise the Lord: here's your first recourse if caught short.