Looking for thrills

WHAT would you do if you found a million pounds in used notes in the street? Hand them in or keep them? Unemployed dock worker and drug addict Joey Coyle did the latter. His true story is told in Finders Keepers (£14.99), by Mark Bowden, author of Black Hawk Down which was recently made into a film.

On February 26, 1981, Coyle found two yellow containers lying in a Philadelphia street.

They had quite literally fallen off the back of a lorry - one which had just collected cash from a casino.

Finder Keepers reveals how Coyle shared the $1.2 million with everyone around him, including his girlfriend, strangers and a mob boss, who allegedly helped launder it.

While the story made the front pages of newspapers across the US, Coyle lived for a week in a drug-fuelled frenzy, planning what to do with the money.

Finders Keepers is a fascinating story of greed, generosity and betrayal, but most remarkably it's all true!

James Patterson is one author who never suffers from writer's block. The American has just released his third thriller in nine months.

This time he has brought back his greatest creation, Dr Alex Cross. He's known to readers for Along Came A Spider - made into a film starring Morgan Freeman as Cross - Kiss The Girls, and Violets Are Blue.

In Four Blind Mice (£16.99) the detective and psychologist is about to quit the Washington DC Police Force when his partner and oldest friend, John Sampson, asks him to "do one last case".

One of Sampson's friends from his time in Vietnam, Sergeant Ellis Cooper, has been arrested for the murder of three women.

They were killed and their bodies painted blue.

Ellis pleads his innocence, and both Sampson and Cross believe him. But a jury does not, and Ellis is sentenced to death.

Sampson is certain his friend has been framed, and Cross's investigation turns up evidence overlooked or concealed by the Army.

Cross and Sampson go behind military lines to confront the most terrifying and deadly-killers they have ever encountered, the Three Blind Mice.

But behind these three assassins appears to be an even more threatening controller, the Fourth Blind Mouse.

As is the norm in Alex Cross novels you get a lot more than just a crime story.

Patterson involves you in Cross's home life, especially his relationship with his elderly grandmother, known as Nana Mama, and his three children, Damon, Janine and little Alex.

In Four Blind Mice, Cross becomes romantically involved with Californian detective Jamilla Hughes, and Sampson falls in love for the first time in his life.

It's an explosive read, one of Patterson's best.

James Lee Burke is one of those authors that you either love or loathe. There's no middle ground.

His rambling and lyrical narratives, vivid and poetic descriptions of the Louisiana landscape, and over-the-top characters with over-the-top names, are his trademark.

Jolie Blon's Bounce (Orion, £12.99), his most obscure title since In The Electric Mist With Confederate Dead, is the 11th novel to feature Lee Burke's greatest creation, New Iberia detective Dave Robicheaux, a Vietnam veteran, reformed alcoholic and family man.

The story begins with the rape and murder of a white teenage girl, Amanda Boudreau.

Local musician Tee Bobby Hulin (the man behind the song, Jolie Blon's Bounce) is arrested.

Shortly after Hulin is released on bail, a prostitute, the daughter of a former mafia hitman, is bludgeoned to death.

But music-loving Robicheaux is not convinced of Hulin's guilt in either of the murders.

As Robicheaux and his womanising buddy, Clete Purcell, delve deeper into the murders (and the past) they come across a variety of bizarre characters including Legion Guidry, the devil incarnate, drug-dealing nightclub boss Jimmy Dean Styles, enigmatic but violent bible salesman Marvin Oates, sex-mad attorney Perry LaSalle, whose family's empire was built on the slave trade, and the mysterious Sal Angelo, who claimed to have saved Robicheaux's life in 'Nam.

But which one, if any, is the killer?

"Bounce" is an absorbing and entertaining read right until the very end when Lee Burke just seems to run out of steam. There are too many questions unanswered, leaving you feeling a little short changed.

Following the success of his last Lincoln Rhyme novel, The Stone Monkey, American author Jeffrey Deaver and his publishers have decided to reissue one of his early novels.

Deaver has apparently heavily rewritten Mistress Of Justice (Hodder&Stoughton, £18.99) for today's market, but it falls well short of his recent novels.

Paralegal Taylor Lockwood is asked to help locate an important document stolen from the offices of a Wall Street legal firm where she works.

But as she delves deeper and deeper into what goes on at the firm, she uncovers damaging secrets which could ruin the company and cripple careers.

If Canadian author Andrew Pyper had been watching British television over the past few months he may have renamed his jungle adventure, I'm A Dot.Com Millionaire, Get Me Out Of Here! His new novel, set in the Brazilian rainforest, has characters equally as irritating and annoying as those in the TV celebrity survivor show.

The Trade Mission (Macmillan, £14.99) follows rich kids Wallace and Bates (they never use first names), translator (and also narrator), Crossman, and two other colleagues on a business trip to Brazil, where they are promoting their revolutionary internet idea.

After a business conference, the team decides to take a "leisurely" boat trip up a tributary of the Amazon.

But just when they are enjoying themselves their boat is stormed by pirates and the crew killed.

The Internet team is then kidnapped at gunpoint, thrown into a pit and tortured. Their true personalities come to the fore, and they are left to decide who can they really trust. You, however, are left to decide whether to continue reading on or not.

Spy novels tend to be either fast action, over-the-top and tongue-in-cheek style of James Bond, or of the John Le Carr variety, dull and dreary. Unfortunately, Cry Havoc by Clive Egleton (Hodder & Stoughton, £18.99) falls into the latter category. An Islamic terrorist group plans to wipe out half of London with poison hidden in whisky bottles

They are also blackmailing a senior member of the British security service, who was drugged and forced into making a pornographic film. The ingredients for a decent read are there, but Egleton bogs us down with too much detail so Cry Havoc never gets out of first gear.

The Argos catalogue would be more exciting.

Updated: 10:06 Wednesday, November 13, 2002