Gripping account of US leadership and altruism that Trump should read | Books | Entertainment

Forty Love by Jane Costello, Paperback Original, £10.99

You don’t need to be a tennis fan to enjoy Jane Costello’s new rom-com Forty Love. Single mum and widow Jules is about to have an empty nest as her 18-year-old daughter Frankie goes travelling post A-Levels. She desperately needs a distraction and turns to the tennis club next door, where her old school crush from 30 years ago – Sam Delaney, now a handsome doctor, just happens to be a player too. As Jules forges new friendships, it’s not just her passion for tennis that is reignited.

With a midlife heroine we can all relate to, Forty Love is a warmhearted, uplifting book. The author of 16 novels, Costello’s assured humorous touch makes this a perfect holiday read. 9/10

The Hollow Boys by Tariq Ashkanani, Hardback, £18.99

Aurora is a dying town, with families moving away and businesses closing as a deep seam of coal burning underground creeps closer every year. One day nine-year-old Danny Yates walks into the rundown town in America, half-starved and silent, 10 months after he and his best friend Will Keefe disappeared. When he finally speaks, he claims to be Will and his mother is convinced he is not really her son.

Chief of Police John Deacon vows to find out what happened in the slim hope Will is still alive. The fourth novel from the author of last year’s acclaimed The Midnight King is an atmospheric small town horror that builds an unsettling sense of dread and does not relent until an ending that will leave you reeling. Stunning. 9/10

Ironwood by Michael Connelly, Hardback, £22

Having been exiled to Catalina Island after falling foul of LA County Sheriff’s Department politics, Detective Sergeant Stilwell is starting to enjoy his punishment posting in the second book in Connelly’s new series when a drugs bust goes wrong and a deputy is shot dead. Benched for an internal inquiry, an unclaimed backpack puts Stilwell on the trail of a missing woman and attracts the attention of Renée Ballard of the LAPD’s Open-Unsolved unit.

Working on opposite sides of the 22-mile channel between Catalina and the California mainland, they soon realise they’re chasing the same case and must team up – putting them on the trail of a killer. Another absolutely unputdownable police procedural from America’s greatest living crime writer. 8/10

The Visionaries by James Holland, Hardback, £20

Co-host of the fabulous We Have Ways Of Making You Talk podcast, Holland made his name bringing some of the Second World War’s most pivotal campaigns to life. And while The Visionaries might contain less bombs, bullets and bazooka, its sweeping take on the carving out of the post-Second World War West is no less gripping. Even before US entry into the war, Franklin D. Roosevelt was already planning for what came next and his successor, Harry S. Truman, was equally determined there be no ruinous Versailles-style fudge.

Subsequently, America’s Marshall Plan was unprecedented in scale, ambition and sheer decency. The current White House incumbent would do well to read this moving and important account. 8/10