Fury by G M Ford (Macmillan, £10.99)

THERE'S not much new in crime fiction these days.

Whatever a writer comes up with, you can bet Chandler, Carver, Leonard or Grisham got there first - and did it better.

Which is no doubt why certain elements of G M Ford's thriller have the clang of clich about them.

Grizzled hack with a troubled past? Yeah, yeah.

Bent cops and political conspiracies? Uh-huh.

Serial killer on the loose? Next!

But there's much to recommend this story of a race against time by journo David Caruso to bust open a cover-up in the corridors of power and save an innocent man from the gas chamber.

The dialogue, while not quite Chandler-esque, is suitably snappy and hard-boiled, and descriptions are liberally sprinkled with nice little metaphors - such as patrician publisher Natalie van der Hoven with her "face from a coin" and "wrought-iron hair".

The tense plot builds up nicely to its climax and is intertwined with a pleasingly liberal agenda - not quite Woodward and Bernstein blowing Watergate wide open, but you get the picture.

This is the first in a planned series of novels featuring David Caruso (the next one is due sometime this year).

While perhaps not destined to become classics in the Philip Marlowe mould, they're certainly an honourable addition to the crime fiction canon.

Ceri Vines