Fiction

Auckland cop Sean Devereaux returns in By Any Means, another of Ben Sanders' police thrillers. Also back is Devereaux' former colleague, bash-anyone-in-sight John Hale. The story starts when a bus driver is accidentally shot in rush-hour Auckland and Devereaux is sent to the scene.

Then Hale sees a young woman taken from a K Rd bar and forced into a car. Two men take off with the girl but a third abductor is left behind. Hale works him over, steals his eftpos card and takes off, pursued by a squad car. After a few hours in police custody, Hale escapes, using a paperclip to unlock his handcuffs.

He then tracks the owner of the eftpos card - which, incidentally, has no name on it - bashes him up and learns a bit more.

Meanwhile, Devereaux is on another case, chasing the killer of a woman and her daughter. For reasons not well explained, he has decided the husband is not guilty, even though all the evidence points to the man.

The two cases intersect but not before there have been more killings, more bashings and descriptions of driving around Auckland tedious enough to have come straight off a GPS system.

• The first rule when reading Angus Donald's Outlaw Chronicles is to suspend belief about Robin Hood and simply enjoy the story. Donald - who from his historical notes at the end of King's Man - has a fair grasp of 12th-century history, ignores the fact that the earliest references to Robin Hood are at least a century later but Donald is, as he says, a storyteller, not an historian.

King's Man is the third in the Outlaw Chronicles series and in it, an aged Alan Dale looks back on his adventures, as Robin leads the push to restore Richard the Lionheart to the English throne after his absence at the Crusades.

Fact and fiction are nicely intermingled: Richard really was imprisoned in what is now Austria and held for ransom; his cruel and violent brother, Prince John, was eyeing the throne; and there really was a siege of Nottingham in 1194AD.

The story rattles along with the great advantage of being able to be enjoyed by those who have not read the earlier books in the series, and will whet the appetite for the further tales promised by Donald.