Barrie Roberts must have enjoyed writing THE VICTORY SNAPSHOT. I can see it as a film - it has tension, chases, and interesting settings. It is successful in both its sense of place (it starts and ends in a Black Country town, but moves out to a chase through North Wales) and in its sense of period. It is set in the present day, but revolves around the war-time Black Market in ration books and manages to suggest some of the distasteful activity that went on during the war and its consequences for today.

By an unlucky co-incidence Sheila McKenna comes back from Australia to visit her grandfather on the day that he is killed. The police start to look for a mugger, but Chris Tyroll, a Bolshie solicitor, had learned from the pathologist that the old man was killed by a karate chop, and muggers don't have skills like that. Chris has the old man's will, but it suggests no reason for his death, so they go through her grandfather's house and discover a wartime photograph. They realise that it is a group of spivs and criminals, but still they can make no connection to the killing.

As they put names to the fifty-year old faces they find that more than time has taken its toll. Going to visit one of the survivors in his retirement home, they find that his survival ended two days before. Suspicious Chris pushes for a post-mortem.

Before long the attacks begin and Chris and Sheila attempt to flee to North Wales, only to be burned out and driven across the hills. That Chris is hunted by men in uniforms, and that the killers are professionally skilled will suggest what he is up against, and he knows it too - "cases that the pole don't want to look into, or that they won't look into because someone has told them not to. Remember the lady who grew roses over in Shropshire?" as Dr Macintyre says.

Perhaps Barrie Roberts loves his hero and heroine too much. He need not have allowed them their ultimate success as well as the absolute defeat of their enemies, but it makes this book a modern rarity to end in a Black Country town on such an upbeat note.

Theme parks, hurricanes, cosmetic surgery, topless dancers: what would Carl Hiaasen find next for his deranged imagination? Until LUCKY YOU arrived I could not have guessed, but I'll tell you now: lottery winners. Plural because in the week that JoLayne Lucks uses the ages of her ex-boyfriends and wins those mega-bucks, it is her bad luck that two dim-wit white supremacists have also chosen those numbers. And since the Florida lottery is like the British (and this is worrying) in that the individuals with the winning ticket in their possession gets the cash, the two plan to get their hands on JoLayne's ticket before she can get to the Lottery Commission offices, so they can take all the money for themselves.

Unfortunately for JoLayne they find her before she can set off. Unluckily for them they don't drive straight to Tallahassee and claim the double cash. But JoLayne can't go straight to the police - like a lot of Carl Hiaasen's heroines she has an agenda that she needs to keep secret. If you've read him before you'll guess what it is: she wants to save the Everglades, but she is in a bidding war and does not want to reveal her hand (or that her ace is no longer in her possession).

Back in JoLayne's home town the hucksters are spotting a quick buck in weeping Madonnas and the apostles who appear on the shells of JoLayne's turtles while she's gone. While her rival in the land war is a mafia capo who needs to make a tax loss. Things just have to go wrong. Unfortunately I found they did not start to get complicated soon enough. The wonders of Hiaasen's earlier novels such as TOURIST SEASON and SKIN TIGHT are the complicated plots that develop from the different and devious interests of the characters, but LUCKY YOU, like STRIPTEASE, does not develop its plots quickly enough or with a great enough variety. Things start to improve about half way through, but they left me with a sense of disappointment, and in turn that must be because the characters are too simple. JoLayne and Krome the journalist are too good, while the two morons are two moronic to do anything that can lead to Hiaasen's gripping plots. Based on his own standards I'd give him a seven out of ten.