- guardian.co.uk, Saturday February 19 2000 11.01 GMT
The Keepers Of Truth
Michael Collins
Phoenix House, £9.99
Buy it at BOL
Bill is a washed-up, washed-out reporter for a dying newspaper in a dead town. The college kid has grand dreams of writing a requiem for the industrial soul which has been ripped out of his mid-western home, but gets his fancy prose licked into shape by the hard-drinking, old-school editor, Sam. Only with the disappearance of Old Man Lawton and the determination of the local cops to fix murder on his son, Ronny, does the dust of the place get under Bill's nails. Collins creates a gripping picture of slow-moving, small-town life, and packs it into a treat of a murder mystery.
Beware The Dwarfs
Terri Paddock
Abacus, £6.99
Buy it at BOL
Another girlie novel whose opening chapters promise much, but which fails to deliver. Shame, as the travails of Paddock's gaggle of SWAFs (single white anxious females) have moments of interest, and her portraits of the blokes who barely reach knee-high in the ideal-man stakes are occasionally poignant. Charlotte, Harriet, Liz, Rebbeca and Joyce are supposed to be the best of friends. All are after the same things - good sex, good careers and good lives - but their show of unity crumbles as they fight their separate ways out of dead-end jobs and grim flats.
Evening
Susan Minot
Vintage, £6.99
Buy it at BOL
Youth, for Minot's dying heroine, Ann Lord, is a time to be cherished: a weekend in New England recalled as a moment of perfection in a lifetime of compromise. On her deathbed, the heavily sedated Ann snatches back her past. Three husbands and two boyfriends drift in and out of her mind, but it is the man she met at a friend's wedding 40 years ago, and fell in love with, to whom she returns. Minot tells the story of fleeting grand passion without sentimentality, capturing her heroine's past with brilliant clarity and describing beautifully the process of letting go of life.
Pedro Páramo
Juan Rulfo
Serpent's Tail, £6.99
Buy it at BOL
Rulfo's novella is deceptively simple and his imagery whittled down. A young man travels back to his birthplace after promising his dying mother that he would seek out the father they fled from. The town he arrives in is a nightmare of ghosts and mysteries, where the distant past and present switch places at will. First published in 1955, Pedro Páramo influenced much South American magic realism, but Rulfo's imagination is a starker, less playful and more chilling creature than anything it has sired.
