Book reviews:

El Sicario

Edited by Charles Bowden & Molly Molloy

Heinemann, 11.99 ***

Kidnapping, extortion, murder, torture … in modern Mexico, the atrocious has become the norm. In a country increasingly run by the narco-traffickers and their wholly owned officials, organised crime and authority are two sides of the same corrupted coin. The contract killer whose interviews make up this book was trained by the Chihuahua state police. His testimony takes us to what Bowden calls "the real Latin America … not a place of magical realism, but a place of murderous realism". The absence of swagger on the sicario's part, of literary pretension on the editors', guarantees their horrific story will be believed. But it's a corollary of the banality-of-evil thesis that evil becomes banal: this book is deeply disturbing – it's also oddly dull.

MOLL

By Sian Rees

Chatto, 18.99 ***

There was no real Moll Flanders, true-to-life though the fictional creation is – yet we can still be said to have falsified her memory, Sin Rees feels. Daniel Defoe skimped on period specifics – arresting as it is, that much-vaunted realism only goes so deep. Once invited to view the product of 17th-century Puritan society as an 18th-century courtesan, we've not been needed to be invited twice to import Merrie England froth and soft-porn paraphernalia. It's hard, though, to see this "Life and Times" as the answer: Rees talks us through the novel, giving us the historical background on everything from penal policy to the Irish wars. Much of her material is wonderfully colourful, but the way it's set out, it's something of a slog: inside this raunchy read there's a plodding commentary trying – all too successfully – to get out.

PRETTY BOY

By Michael Wallis

Norton, 12.99 ****

A splash of colour in the gloom of the Depression, the exploits of America's armed robbers helped lift the mood for the little guy. Baby Face Nelson, Bonnie and Clyde, John Dillinger … vicious killers they may have been, but. in an era of foreclosures, they hit back at America's banks; when they died, they were grass-roots martyrs. None was more notorious than Oklahoma's Pretty Boy Floyd – even if his notoriety owed as much to his nickname as his feats. The achievement of this biography is to do justice both to Charles Arthur Floyd the man and Pretty Boy the myth.