The Four Courts Murder By Andrew Nugent Hodder Ireland npa 341pps NUGENT is a retired solicitor, now a Benedictine monk so he is well qualified in the ways of crime and human nature. In this, his debut novel, he also displays a fine dry humour. A Dublin High Court judge has literally got it in the neck . . . broken by a well-aimed kick.

Turns out the judge had a lucrative hobby and was fond of tartlets.

A cop investigating Piggott concludes: "investigating his lady friends had been easy going, because so had they". No one mourns the dead judge, least of all his son whom he savagely beat as a child. Did he kill his pop? Another suspect quotes Shakespeare: "O cursed spirit, that ever I was born, to put things right." Was killing a man putting things right? Great read all the same.

Carry Me Down By M J Hyland Canongate �8.00 330pps JOHN EGAN, Wexford-born 11-years-old, wants to get into the 'Guinness Book of Records', not because he scales over 6 foot in height, but because of his ability to detect liars. The family move from Wexford to Ballymun and it is here that the book becomes problematic. An Oedipal undercurrent is introduced when John succeeds in getting his alcoholic father evicted from the home, a move that is followed by John's move into his mother's bed. This is a highly disturbing theme: a young lad not mature enough to understand even normal relationships let alone a possible incestuous one. As you expect, the mother takes him for medical help in order that he understands what the onset of puberty is all about. Poor John struck this reader as being more disturbed than confused.

The Book of Lost Things By John Connolly Hodder �7.00 502pps IN A 2006 interview Dublin-born Connolly said he wanted a break from thrillers, something completely different and they don't come more different than this. Bookish David is 12-years-old when his mother dies. His father remarries and David doesn't take to the woman. He crosses the frontiers from reality into fantasy and meets the fantastic, funny, grotesques characters of the books that line his bedroom wall. He encounters cannibals, monster worms, and in the hilarious chapter 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarves: The Dwarves are Commies' . . . "The workers must resist oppressionf" They take him home to Snow White who is on the pull . . .

"Company? MmmfI'd have put on my face." She gets smoochy. She smiles exposing lipstick-smeared teeth. Wonderful, but not for children.

Sir Alf By Leo McKinstry Harper �9.00 528pps IN THIS richly detailed life, World Cup-winning football manager Alf Ramsey comes across as a shy and modest man with an insecure man's need to put on a toffee-nosed facade, gauche in front of a microphone. In one BBC interview, quoted here, he is asked are his parents still alive and where do they live: "Oh yes. . . Dagenham, I believe." That's him all right. Clipped, one of the chaps. Iron-willed disciplinarian, stuff of which empires were won. A stickler for discipline who dropped the greatest striker in England . . . Jimmy Greaves . . . because he didn't fit into Ramsey's World-Cup winning plans. The magnificent index is an example to other publishers.