STEVE ANDREW enjoys an account of the many communities that flourished independently of and in resistance to the empires of old
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Crime fiction
Reviews of Pretty Things by Janelle Brown, How to Kidnap the Rich by Rahul Raina, Marion Lane and the Midnight Murder by TA Willberg and Guilty by Siobhan MacDonald
TOM STONE urges you to catch the last dates of a New York singer/songwriter, never afraid to challenge her audiences musically or politically
JAN WOOLF examines work that aims to give viewers a material experience of the environments in the polar north and Britain equally affected by the climate crisis
The bard recalls advice received 50 years ago from his TRB muse, and sorts out appropriate legislation for football club ownership
MICHAL BONCZA and MARIA DUARTE review Facing War, Kontinental ’25, Bugonia, and Relay
MAYER WAKEFIELD is frustrated by a production of Ibsen’s classic study of an anti-heroine that fails to elucidate her motivations
PETER MASON tunes his ear into the domestic affairs of a Carribbean couple with a troublesome son
IN PRETTY THINGS by Janelle Brown (Weidenfeld, £8.99) Nina is forced by her con artist mother’s medical bills to abandon her attempt to escape the family trade.
She makes a living stealing from ultra-rich hedonists in Los Angeles but rising hospital bills mean she now needs to devise a more ambitious scam, so she returns to the scene of a teenage humiliation, the Lake Tahoe mansion of billionaire heiress Vanessa.
Nina sees her as a perfect target — rich, vapid and untouched by the vicious unfairness of the class system. But this book warns that when you meet your enemies, you are in danger of discovering that they are human after all and that can cause all manner of complications.
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