The latest paperbacks reviewed.
Second Son. Christy Kenneally. Hodder Headline Ireland €14.99
A most confident first novel, this one. From the cliffs of an island off the west coast of Ireland, a young man plummets to his death. His older brother Michael, once a soldier in the US Special Forces and now a priest in the Bronx, returns for the funeral mass. Did his sibling fall or was he pushed? Signs on, it's the latter. A mysterious Major Devane has started a fish factory on the island, but what, in fact, is being manufactured there? His enforcer is the wonderfully named Sergeant Skald, a Grade-A villain if ever there was one. When action man priest Michael comes up against him, there's bound to be hell to pay. The supporting cast is wonderfully fleshed out, and the locations move from Ireland's western coast to New York and on to the jungles of South America. A masterful debut, then, and even if the plot depends a lot on coincidence, it still zips along at a terrific pace. Vincent Banville
Port Mungo. Patrick McGrath. Bloomsbury, £7.99
Any novel by Patrick McGrath, a polished, original storyteller, whose novels include The Grotesque, Spider, Dr Haggard's Disease, Asylum and the engaging, if shaky Martha Peake, should be well worth reading, but this book is not. Gin Rathbone shares her traditional English childhood with adored brother Jack. All is wonderful. Off they trot, together, to art college. There, alas, Jack falls under the spell of Vera Savage, an older established artist, none too clean and overly fond of alcohol. Gin tells the tale with all the biased venom of a duped lover. The crazed romance ends in a messy marriage and doomed daughters, in, no kidding, a tropical village. This tedious, conventional melodrama is poorly served by its unconvincing narrator. The real tragedy however is that Patrick McGrath is so very good and Port Mungo falls so embarrassingly short of his gifts. Eileen Battersby
Spice: The History of a Temptation. Jack Turner. Harper Perennial, £8.99
During the "spice race" of the 16th century, Ferdinand Magellan's circumnavigation of the globe became a financial success when one of his ships brought back 381 bags of cloves. What drove the West to put such value on the spices of the east? Turner has traced our craving for spices, mainly pepper, clove, nutmeg, mace, cinnamon, and ginger. Of no nutritional value, the use of spice in food was for centuries a symbol of wealth. Christians and pagans alike believed in the mystical and medicinal powers of spices. And the first known western spice user was a corpse: Rameses II had peppercorns stuffed up his nose when his body was being preserved. Part social and culinary history, part adventure book, Spice contains no unifying argument. It meanders through different times and places. But as Turner points out, that is "exactly what spices themselves have always done". Ralph Benson
Protestant Boy. Geoffrey Beattie. Granta Books, £8.99
Journalist, broadcaster and Big Brother psychology guru Prof Geoffrey Beattie follows We Are the People: Journeys Through the Heart of Protestant Ulster with this eloquently narrated journey-of-discovery to find his own Protestant working-class identity and its heroes. His search begins in the first World War trenches of the Somme and the heroic deeds, and myths, of the 36th Ulster Division, and continues on to the newer heroless trenches at Drumcree and to the "planter village" of Donaghcloney, the homeland of his father's people. Along the way he comes to terms with his own past, the viciousness of his early youth in the sectarian cockpit of north Belfast, his "lucky escape" to a middle-class education at Belfast Royal Academy and Cambridge, and above all, hovering menacingly, his relationship with his overbearing and overpowering mother. Martin Noonan
Browning: A Private Life. Iain Finlayson. Harper Perennial, £15
Despite the author's protestations to the contrary, this exhaustive biography seems to take an inordinate time to reach the most interesting period of Browning's long life, the 19 years of his clandestine courtship and marriage to Elizabeth Barrett.
Finlayson does a sound job in defining Browning within his family history and the literati of the day, but not such a confident one in discussing his poetry. He cites Browning's eccentric self-education in his father's library as the main cause of much that was baffling in the poet's work and which resulted in many painful flops - he had more ideas than he knew how to disentangle but was unmatched when he distilled them into dramatic monologues. Finlayson leans heavily in the text on previous lives of Browning as he constructs his thesis, an uncomfortable procedure better left to notes. Olivia Hamilton
The Wisdom of Crowds: Why Many Are Smarter Than The Few. James Surowiecki. Abacus, £7.99
Readers who enjoyed Malcolm Gladwell's seminal look at mass psychology, The Tipping Point, will get a kick out of Surowiecki's attempt to disabuse us of our distrust of crowds. Written in a similarly breathless manner, page after page features small experiments growing into epic conclusions. The author suggests a large group will be a better judge of a situation than even an expert individual. The book is flooded with examples of everything from quiz show audiences to jars of beans. Crowds have proven accurate at guessing the weight of an ox at a local fair and investors guessed within hours what caused the crash of the Challenger space shuttle. Unfortunately, some of the evidence seems superficial and its style can be irksome, but this sugar-coated psychology book still offers much to chew on. Shane Hegarty