BOOK OF THE WEEK

The Skin Collector by Jeffery Deaver is published by Hodder & Stoughton, priced £18.99 in hardback (eBook £6.99). Available now.

The Skin Collector has been a long time coming for loyal fans of prolific crime author Jeffery Deaver. Some 17 years after 1997's The Bone Collector, which was adapted into a film starring Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie, comes its long-awaited semi-sequel, featuring Deaver's most loved character, quadriplegic consultant forensic detective Lincoln Rhyme.

The 11th book in the series, which also features NYPD officers Amelia Sachs, Lon Sellitto and Ron Pulaski, sees the team tackle the case of a serial killer terrorising New York, who picks victims at random from dark alleyways, secluded passages and dank basements.

Chillingly methodical, the murderer - who has learnt to cover up his tracks from Lincoln's book - kills by injecting lethal poison into targets, in the form of elaborate tattoos, and it is up to Lincoln and his cohorts to decipher these messages and designs, and untangle the twisted web of clues as the clock ticks.

Superbly written with Deaver's signature twists, cliffhangers and misdirections, The Skin Collector is another gripping thriller from the king of suspense, and might just make you think twice about taking that quiet shortcut home or heading down some dark side street.

8/10

(Review by Shereen Low)

Chestnut Street by Maeve Binchy is published in hardback by Orion, priced £18.99 (eBook £6.64). Available now.

The residents of the fictional Chestnut Street are brought to life with Maeve Binchy's signature style in this collection of short stories.

Although the Irish author died in 2012, these stories were written over several decades.

Very loosely linked - characters only re-appear occasionally and with fleeting reference - the stories reveal a street where a plethora of people cope with the variety of scenarios life throws at them.

Lilian is warned about the dangers of marrying a stingy man, window cleaner Bucket Maguire never gives up on his son, four strangers become New Year's Eve friends and Anna never seems to realise her husband is having an affair, or does she?

This is not a collection of fluff, but a volume of stories that explores the experiences and problems faced by people not only on Chestnut Street, but everywhere.

8/10

(Review by Catherine Wylie)

Black Lake by Johanna Lane is published in hardback by Tinder Press, priced £16.99 (eBook £8.49). Available now.

Black Lake is an intimate portrayal of an Irish aristocratic family in turmoil. The Campbell family have lived at Dunlough, an idyllic and rambling estate in Donegal, for generations. But dwindling finances are forcing them out, which consequently sets in motion a tragic sequence of events that changes their lives forever.

Debut author Johanna Lane has produced a complex and beautifully structured story. Skipping between time periods, each chapter allows a member of the family a chance to reveal their side of the story and the multiple perspectives of the same event provide a compelling and multidimensional tale.

In places, the pace feels slow, but that's more than made up for with Johanna's beautifully descriptive prose and perceptive insights into the minds of each of the characters, especially eight-year-old Phillip. Exploring notions of family legacy and memory, Black Lake is a poignant and haunting tale that really resonates.

6/10

(Review by Alison Potter)

Glow by Ned Beauman is published in hardback by Sceptre, priced £16.99 (eBook £8.49). Available now.

Glow is Ned Beauman's third novel. An ambitious tale of multinational corporations, people from Burma going missing, silent white vans and street drugs, namely Glow.

The protagonist is Raf, from south London, who suffers from a syndrome that has set his body's circadian rhythm to 25 hours, leaving him at the edge of society and out of sync with the world. Unable to hold down a 9-5 job, he spends his time working on computer programmes, caring for a pirate radio station's guard dog and researching the latest party drug of choice.

One day he wakes up and something isn't quite right. Even more so that usual. And he is dragged into a mystery starting with the disappearance of a recent acquaintance from his home. This is a slow burner of a book, with great descriptive text but it doesn't seem to have the drive of some of Beauman's contemporaries.

6/10

(Review by Rachel Howdle)

All The Things You Are by Clemency Burton-Hill is published in paperback original by Headline Review, priced £7.99 (eBook £4.99). Available now.

You might know Clemency Burton-Hill already from her colourful career as an actress and presenter. Unfortunately, All The Things You Are, a romance novel that uses the Israeli-Arab conflict as a backdrop, is not quite enough to establish her as an equally successful author of fiction. While the prose itself is rather lovingly written, peppered with faithful Yiddisher exclamations and with richly described locations, the characterisation doesn't quite stand up to the weighty subject matter the author has chosen to dice with.

Protagonist Natasha Bernstein is a Jewish New Yorker down on her luck - she loses her job and her fiancee in quick succession, and finds herself in Israel, accompanied by her new beau, a dreamy New Yorker of Palestinian extraction.

There are bittersweet moments that make a good impact and, crucially, give you the momentum to keep plodding on to the end. But the characters are almost entirely paper-thin in their motivation, dialogue and behaviour. They seem to move from one situation to the next, barely registering much in the way of cause and effect, while the lesser characters are little more than rudimentary sketches. The book's climax, in spite of its grave subject matter, falls oddly flat.

4/10

(Review by Amy Nicholson)

NON FICTION

A Curious Career by Lynn Barber is published in hardback by Bloomsbury, priced £16.99 (eBook £7.72). Available now.

Back in the late Eighties and early Nineties, Lynn Barber established herself as our finest exponent of the celebrity interview. When the Independent On Sunday began, her pieces - compellingly limpid, shrewd, unsentimental, first-person accounts that asked the killer questions that didn't usually get asked - were reason enough to buy the paper.

She published two collections of her classic head-to-heads with the likes of Jimmy Savile ('People say... you like little girls,' she told him), Earl Spencer and Melvyn Bragg, who was apparently traumatised by the experience.

The golden age of interviewing over which she presided is in decline now, thanks to the control freakery of press officers and the relentless need to plug product. But Barber, now in her early 70s, continues to interview for The Sunday Times, the doyenne of a dying genre.

In this latest volume she collects a few more of her pieces, and tops and tails them with reflections on interviewing best practice and various autobiographical snippets. She includes a coda to the true story of Simon, the conman she nearly married, which became the subject of the film An Education, based on her coming of age memoir of the same name.

Barber always speaks as she finds and we must do the same. I found the book a bit of a disappointing miscellany. The bits about interviewing have a reheated air and are likely to be of limited interest to lay readers. By her own admission, her life has been fairly safe and low-risk, and the key dramas have already been covered elsewhere. Personally I would rather just have read lots more of those deftly scripted encounters that were good enough to sell a newspaper.

6/10

(Review by Dan Brotzel)

CHILDREN'S BOOK OF THE WEEK

Little Lou And The Woolly Mammoth by Paula Bowles is published in paperback by Bloomsbury, priced £6.99 (eBook £5.99). Available now.

In the prettily drawn Little Lou And The Woolly Mammoth, illustrator and writer Paula Bowles delights in telling the tale of a young girl who pulls a loose piece of wool and discovers a creature at the end of it.

Little Lou is not short of toys but she's bored of playing with her sock monster and her stripy whale so when a piece of wool wriggles past her, she can't resist giving it a tug.

But when she pulls further and further, she discovers that the yarn is attached to a giant woolly mammoth.

Scared, Little Lou runs away, leaving the woolly mammoth chasing her. But as he does so, he becomes undone and shrinks and then becomes scared of Little Lou who is now much bigger than he.

When Little Lou stoops down to pick him up, the little woolly mammoth trembles with fear but when she cuddles him, the two realise that they can become friends instead.

Lovingly drawn, with a sweet message throughout, this is a charming book that reads well out loud.

6/10

(Review by Keeley Bolger)

BESTSELLERS FOR WEEK ENDING MAY 10

HARDBACKS

1. Minecraft: The Official Construction Handbook

2. Minecraft: The Official Combat Handbook

3. A Tiny Bit Lucky: Tom Gates, Liz Pichon

4. Capital In The Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty

5. Minecraft: The Official Redstone Handbook

6. Minecraft: The Official Beginner's Handbook

7. The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair, Joel Dicker

8. Allegiant: Divergent, Veronica Roth

9. The Skin Collector: The Lincoln Rhyme Series, Jeffery Deaver

10. Gwynne's Latin: The Ultimate Introduction to Latin Including the Latin, N.M Gwynne

(Compiled by Waterstones)

PAPERBACKS

1. The Girl Who Saved the King Of Sweden, Jonas Jonasson

2. Inferno: Robert Langdon, Dan Brown

3. An Officer And A Spy, Robert Harris

4. And The Mountains Echoed, Khaled Hosseini

5. The Fault In Our Stars, John Green

6. Hanns And Rudolf: The German Jew And The Hunt For The Kommandant Of Aus, Thomas Harding

7. The Chimp Paradox: The Acclaimed Mind Management Programme To Help You, Dr Steve Peters

8. The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out Of The Window And Disappeared, Jonas Jonasson

9. The Reason I Jump: One Boy's Voice From The Silence Of Autism, Naoki Higashida

10. BBC Proms 2014: the Official Guide

(Compiled by Waterstones)

EBOOKS

1. The Four Streets, Nadine Dorries

2. Summers Child, Diane Chamberlain

3. Look Behind You, Sibel Hodge

4. Fractured, Dani Atkins

5. The Accident, C.L Taylor

6. Silent Echo, J.R Rain

7. The Villa, Rosanna Ley

8. Twelve Years A Slave, Solomon Northup

9. Before We Met, Lucie Whitehouse

10. The Son, Jo Nesbo

(Chart courtesy of Amazon.co.uk)