Full Stop, by Joan Smith (Vintage, £5,99 in UK)

Suppose you're staying at a friend's apartment in New York for the weekend, the friend being absent on what when you come to think of it is actually rather vague and unspecified business out of town, and you start getting obscene phone calls. Then a nice cop calls offering help, except that he's not a cop at all but the obscene caller in another guise. Gradually you realise you're being followed. An unsettling situation, to put it mildly, and one which Joan Smith sets up with skill in this Loretta Lawson thriller. As the atmosphere smoulders on she juggles a veritable shoal of red herrings with impressive deftness, but somehow it all fizzles out rather badly, and the denouement is a terrible anti climax.