Summer frights

AUTHOR Clive Barker's description of Coldheart Canyon (Harper Collins, £16.99) as "a really strange, dark book" is the understatement of the year. I've read some weird books in my time, but this one is in a league of its own.

Only Barker could dream up a tale where the ghosts of dead Hollywood stars, such as Rudolph Valentino, Douglas Fairbanks and Clara Bow, take part in al fresco sex orgies and mate with wild animals to produce grotesque hybrids.

In one scene, a creature with the face of Lana Turner and the body of a jaguar bites the head off an unwelcome guest!

The story is centred on "current" Hollywood heartthrob Todd Pickett who, fearing his looks are going, decides to have plastic surgery. But the operation goes hideously wrong, and he ends up looking like the Phantom of the Opera.

He takes refuge in a place he thinks no one will find him, a forgotten Hollywood mansion called Coldheart Canyon.

There, he meets the "lady" of the house, Romanian-born Katya Lupi - a queen of the silent movie era - who, instead of being a centenarian, looks like she did in the 1920s.

Katya, who has an insatiable appetite for bizarre sex, soon has Todd under her spell and trusts him with a secret which will change his life forever.

Coldheart Canyon left me shell-shocked. It's strange, very strange, but extremely hard to put down.

Greg Iles's last novel, 24 Hours, was possibly the best thriller of 2000, and his latest, Dead Sleep (Hodder & Stoughton, £17.99), is equally impressive.

While viewing an art exhibition in Hong Kong, war photographer Jordan Glass is horrified to discover that one of the subjects of Nude Women In Repose is in fact her twin sister, who disappeared 18 months previously.

She's even more horrified by the rumour that the women painted are not in fact asleep, but dead. Determined to find out whether her sister is alive, Jordan teams up with the FBI in a bid to catch the killer.

A superb plot, with unexpected twists and turns. Iles just gets better and better.

Michael Ridpath has done the impossible; making the finance world seem exciting. The Predator (Penguin, £9.99), features a group of ambitious trainees at top investment bank Bloomfield Weiss.

At the end of their training programme, and before they go their own way, the friends hold a party on a yacht, but by the end of the night one of them is dead, and for the rest, their lives will never be the same again.

Ten years later, one of the gang is brutally slain in Prague. Then others are killed. But who is behind the murders?

A gripping read, with plenty of shocks and surprises along the way.

In recent years, Kathy Reichs has never been out of the bestseller lists. Her fourth book, Fatal Voyage (Heinemann, £16.99), again features feisty forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.

When a plane crashes high in the mountains of North Carolina, Brennan is sent to help identify the bodies. But the chance discovery of a severed foot disturbs her. It is found well away from the main crash site near to an abandoned house.

When her discovery is brought to the attention of her superiors, she is ridiculed and suspended. Someone on high wants it covered up and Brennan is determined to find out why. Highly recommended.

If you want something a little different, then try Stephen Baxter's entertaining and thought-provoking Origin (Harper Collins, £16.99).

NASA astronaut Reid Malenfant is flying over Africa when a huge UFO appears and at the same time a red moon dramatically replaces our familiar grey moon. Malenfant's plane is destroyed as he chases the UFO, but he manages to eject to safety. His wife, Emma, though, is swept up and hurled towards the red moon.

Though much of the earth is devastated by floods and earthquakes caused by the change in the tides, Malenfant finds a way to get to the red moon to rescue his wife. A mission which ultimately reveals the true origins of the universe.