The Marriage Game by Alison Weir (Arrow, £7.99)
The soap opera that is the Tudor reign is a gift to commercial fiction, and few have benefited as much as Weir, whose excellent histories of this period and others are less well reflected in her fiction. Her Elizabeth I is less of a queen and more a flouncing girl in a Mills and Boon.
Smoke Gets In Your Eyes And Other Lessons From The Crematorium by Caitlin Doughty (Canongate, £12.99)
This may not be a read for the faint-hearted but there's a welcome honesty to Doughty's account of her time as a mortician, which starts when she has to shave the face of her first corpse. In some ways, it's reassuring that we return to dust, and Doughty's healthy humour and practicality are reassuring too.
The Steady Running Of The Hour by Justin Go (Windmill, £8.99)
Debut US novelist Justin Go gives some freshness to the well-worn story of a mysterious legacy left to the hero, as student Tristan Campbell races against time to prove he is the genuine inheritor of a vast estate. With the First World War as background, plus a missing woman, it easily ticks several boxes.
Kitty Genovese: The Murder, The Bystanders, The Crime That Changed America by Kevin Cook (Norton, £9.99)
Many things about the brutal murder in 1964 of Kitty Genovese in Brooklyn are shocking, but few more so than what was reported at the time: that her neighbours heard her cries for help and did nothing. Cook's expose is equally brutal but also riveting, about social order and the city as well.
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