Stealing Water

By Tim Ecott

Sceptre, £8, 304pps

IT IS clear from the outset that Ecott is dead set on enjoying himself in the writing of his irresistibly funny memoir. For health reasons, his family moved from Northern Ireland to South Africa in the 1970s. Tim had bronchitis, Dad's reasons for moving were also based on health; he was in the British Army. So it was one apartheid regime for another. That said, though, with the weather and the colour, you'd have far more fun in South Africa. Factor in the people who gathered inside his eccentric mother's shop, The Whatnot, and there's the recipe for a howler. There was Babette who kept a monkey in her bra. Either it was a tiny spider monkey or she was a very large lady. "She smelled slightly of monkey piss." Only slightly. Meanwhile, Mam was refining her skills to selling passports at The Whatnot. She claimed to be Irish, but was born in Cairo. Mr Goldstein, the landlord, wanted Mam out of The Whatnot. Dad knew how to refine effective Molotov Cocktails. "Mr Goldstein's Merc went Whoomph!!" Mam heard no more from Mr Goldstein. To use an overused word, this is indeed memorable.

The Suspicions of Mr Whicher

Or the Murder at Road Hill House

By Kate Summerscale

Bloomsbury, £8, 380pps

ON THE morning of 30 June 1860, Mr and Mrs Kent woke to the news that someone had stuffed their three-year-old son, Saville, down an outside toilet. Local Wiltshire police plods make a horlicks of their investigations, so Scotland Yard is called in: Enter Det Jack Whicher, who almost immediately suspects Saville's teenage half-sister, Constance. And in this he was all too accurate. The reaction was a collective gasp from middle England. How dare Whicher! A working-class servant (policeman) barging into the home of a nice middle-class couple and then suspecting a sweet-tempered girl. Charles Dickens waded in against Whicher. The Times of London thundered out anti-Whicher editorials. He had turned a great country house in Wiltshire into a little house of horrors more likely to be found in the East End of London. Poor man. He retired. Constance was found guilty. Served 20 years. Released. Disappeared. Those writers hoping to write a non-fiction novel, don't rush to buy In Cold Blood. Buy this.

AD 381: Heretics, Pagans and The Christian State

By Charles Freeman

Pimlico, £15, 252pps

IN HIS previous polemic on how religion does not encourage free thinking, Freeman got right up the noses of Christian theologians. His latest questioning of orthodoxies will have them tuning pink with pique. It's not that he's a "God is Not Great" anti-religious bigot, he just has a few questions and he is a very fine writer. He also knows his history. He goes right to the brute truth of how the church fell into cahoots with the state and, he claims, has since been hushed up. Actually it was Emperor Theodosius who, in 381, insisted that all Roman subjects believe in a trinity of equality between the Father, Son and Holy Ghost. He had no interest in religion, but he had in the Empire, which was showing signs of wear, and his new-found interest in religion and his diktat was an effort to unify it.

Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women

And Mind Doctors from 1800 to the Present

By Lisa Appignanesi

Virago, £13, 529pps

RIGHT from the French Revolution (when a woman's place was in the wrong) to the mid-1960s (when she was still in the wrong, but starting at last to kick back), included here are intriguing portraits of the genuinely caring counsellors, and quacks who had little chemistry or empathy with the women in their care. The Bad: Mary Lamb (who murdered her mother). The Sad: Virginia Woolf, died of suicide. Zelda Fitzgerald and Marilyn Monroe, who simply had mild personality disorders and needed human support and not chemical drugs.

This Night's Foul Work

By Fred Vargas

Vintage, £8, 409pps

CHAPTER by chapter, page by page, Vargas's whodunnit gets weirder and weirder. Set in Paris, commissionaire Adamsberg leads the investigation into the murder of two men found in Paris with their throats neatly slit. Next a stag is found with its heart hacked out. On the loose from jail is an angel of death (Angelo del Morte) who also happens to be mad and a nurse. There is a desecrated grave and a new recruit to Adamsberg's investigative team who speaks in verse. What with the poetry-loving cop, the mad nurse, the stag and the vandalised grave, this one has a beginning, a muddle and an end.