TWO paperbacks on the shelves that document a darker side of London have appeared on the shelves. Murder Guide To London (Orion, $60) investigates a city author Martin Fido says is the murder capital of Britain. More than half the memorable British murders have taken place in London.
Fido looks at notorious killers such as Jack the Ripper, Dr Crippen, the Kray Twins and Dennis Nilsen.
The second crime book looks not so much at crime, but the men who fight it. The Flying Squad (Headline, $102), by Neil Darbyshire and Brian Hilliard, is an account of the first 75 years of the police unit that inspired the British television detective drama The Sweeney.
The Flying Squad was formed after World War I with unprecedented powers to combat a wave of post-war crime. Darbyshire is the Daily Telegraph's crime correspondent and Hilliard is editor of Police Review.
Also on the crime front, but fictional crime, three successful thrillers have appeared in paperback. Patrica D. Cornwell's Cruel And Unusual (Warner Books, $85) won the Gold Dagger Award in the US. Scott Smith's A Simple Plan (Corgi, $85), a story of greed and betrayal, was hailed by horror writer Stephen King as one of the best suspense novels of the 90s. A Dangerous Fortune (Pan, $85), by Ken Follett, is also a story of greed, this time set in the 19th century.
In Lonely Hearts Of The Cosmos (Picador, $136) Dennis Overbye makes a valiant attempt at unravelling the mysteries of the universe and at profiling some of the people - Stephen Hawking and Edwin Hubble, for example - who have been at the forefront of cosmic research in recent decades.
