The Irish Times reviews a selection of paperbacks.
Lost Souls by Michael Collins, Phoenix £6.99
On Hallowe'en night in a small American town, the body of a small girl is found curled in a pile of leaves by the roadside. Lawrence, the policeman who discovers her, has had his own dreams crushed and forsaken, and knows the complexities of loss; the official report on the child's death talks of a hit and run, but he intuits otherwise and is driven to learn the truth. An unseen mother, a suspect mayor, a star football player and his violent father are all ensnared in the mystery of that night. In confronting them, Lawrence may be running from his own troubles, but ends up bearing them more heavily than before. Collins's portrait of a man, and a society, uncertain whether morals count for anything at all is masterful, but his novel strains under the demands of the crime thriller genre; too many threads remain trailing, too many questions unanswered, by its close. Belinda McKeon
Mrs. Astor's New York: Money and Social Power in a Gilded Age by Eric Homberger, Yale University Press, £12.95
A former British colony becomes a wealthy republic. Some of its newly rich citizens get notions and copy the lifestyles of their former rulers. This cautionary tale for our times analyses how the mother-of-all-snobs, Mrs Astor, presided over a neo-aristocratic clique in late 19th-century New York. Four hundred people formed a privileged and incestuous golden circle, received lavish media coverage and became the first modern "celebrities". They were ruthless in their efforts to exclude parvenus. The Irish were not welcome. Belfast-born, Trinity-educated merchant prince Alexander Stewart was shunned despite his great wealth and Fifth Avenue mansion. Remnants of this caste-iron social hierarchy survive in snooty Manhattan as memorably depicted in The Bonfire of the Vanities. Recommended, especially, to admirers of Henry James and Edith Wharton. Michael Parsons
Cuba Confidential by Ann Louise Bardach, Penguin Books, £8.99
A senior US diplomat in Havana once compared his country's attitude to Cuba to that of a wolf to a full moon. It is hard to disagree with that description today as President George W. Bush continues to impose an economic blockade, in mortal contradiction of his core belief in free trade, which has allowed Fidel Castro to posture against the blockade even though it ring-fences him against blame for Cuba's problems. Bardach, an award-winning investigative reporter, got the inside story from all the principals on both sides during a decade of upheaval during which a cornered Havana and the Bacardi-backed exiles in Miami-Dade County shared little but antagonism and broken families. Nonetheless, she sees signs of a softening of attitudes, and has a fascinating take on the big question - what happens when El Jefe finally takes the big sleep? John Moran
Palace Of Wisdom by Olaf Tyaransen, Hot Press Books, €13.99
Is there anything Olaf Tyaransen can't do? Judging by this collection of articles for Hot Press, the answer is plenty; he certainly finds it difficult to get through an interview without mentioning William Burroughs or asking his subjects about drugs. He has, at least, chosen apt interviewees: in Allen Ginsberg, Irvine Welsh, Howard Marks and their like he is guaranteed a yawn-inducing conversation about cannabis, ecstasy or - gasp - heroin every time. The lingering fug may help to explain the direness of some of his questions (so, he asks Candace Bushnell, author of Sex And The City, was your wedding day the happiest of your life?). Thank heavens he is mildly self-aware, and so he apologises, lamely, for the haste with which his job requires him to write and, more admirably, exploits the comic potential of his interview with Gerry Adams, a man for whom no encounter with the self-styled enfant terrible of Irish journalism can end too soon. Liam Stebbing
Searching for John Ford: A Life by Joseph McBride, Faber, £9.99
McBride has delivered the mother of all film biogs: 800-plus pages on the Oscar-winning director of The Quiet Man, The Searchers, The Grapes of Wrath and 200 or so others. There's probably far more than most readers will want to know about Ford's films, quite a few of which have dated badly. But the book succeeds as a complex, warts-and-all portrait of an often deeply unpleasant man who was only truly happy when making movies. Ford, a first-generation Irish-American, worked in early Hollywood as stunt man, bit actor and director of increasingly important films. He returned to Ireland several times, including in 1951, when he directed John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara in The Quiet Man. Warning: The photos have been poorly reproduced in this edition. Kevin Sweeney
The Sucker's Kiss by Alan Parker, Sceptre, £6.99
Alan Parker wrote his début novel during an industrial dispute in Hollywood. If he did so as an escape from the world of film, it didn't work quite that way, for the director of The Commitments, Birdy, and Angela's Ashes is very much in evidence in The Sucker's Kiss, an engaging, highly visual story with a light touch. Narrated by Thomas Patrick Moran, pickpocket by profession and philosopher by nature, whose career as a criminal is launched during the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, it rattles as effortlessly as a San-Fran streetcar through the eras of Depression and Prohibition before shuddering to a halt - for it is, as you might guess, a love story - at a kind of Redemption. Pleasant rather than profound, it features too much of the one-dimensional Moran for comfort. But never mind that, what we all want to know is - when's the movie coming out? Arminta Wallace