Crime Review: This story is told by a man, never identified, recently relocated to Corumba in western Brazil, close to the Bolivian border. The chance acquisition of cocaine provides a financial opportunity, but an attempt to capitalise ends in disaster, with Bolivian drug-dealers threatening dire consequences if he doesn’t...

‘FALLOUT one of 5 selected for Guardian Crime Roundup: Winner of the antipodean Ned Kelly and Ngaio Marsh awards, Paul Thomas is the author of a series featuring Maori policeman Tito Ihaka. At the beginning of the latest, Fallout (Bitter Lemon, £8.99), Thomas sets several hares running: a cold case...

‘A book about a woman from a war-shredded country, who discovers she has breast cancer… Not a bundle of laughs, one would assume. One would be wrong. Chernobyl Strawberries is, amongst other things, very funny. Goldsworthy decided to write this memoir after her cancer diagnosis, as a record for her...

‘Whether it was a Druid temple, an astronomical calendar or a centre for healing, the mystery of Stonehenge has long been a source of speculation and debate. Now a dramatic new theory suggests that the prehistoric monument was in fact “an ancient Mecca on stilts”. The megaliths would not have...

‘In Nykänen's intricately plotted second Ariel Kafka novel to be published in English (after 2012's Nights of Awe), the Helsinki Violent Crimes Unit cop looks into the shooting murder of Jewish businessman Samuel Jacobson, whose daughter he once dated. Jacobson's widow reveals that her husband recently engineered a major loan...

‘Leon Trotsky's brutal assassination by a Stalinist agent in Mexico in August 1940 might seem an unlikely wellspring for fiction, but it has inspired more than one novelist in recent years. Barbara Kingsolver's "The Lacuna," published in 2009, centered on an aspiring writer, a Mexican-American, who is shown joining Trotsky's...