The Informers, by Bret Easton Ellis (Picador, £5.99 in UK)

Never having read Ellis's notoriously violent American Psycho, I opened The Informers in all innocence and allowed its succession of first person narrators to take me by the hand from its irritating, but innocuous, opening chapters to the depths of depravity into which it plunges at the end. I'm still having the nightmares. There's no denying that the writing is artful and the writer observant and, I suspect, intensely moral behind all the sardonic posturing of his narrators.