Jock Serong is known as an author of gripping books about crime and catastrophe. His stories spark and seethe with tense emotional and political detail, often drawing on his other skills – in law, and in surf writing. He’s won wide critical acclaim for Quota, On the Java Ridge and The Rules of Backyard Cricket.

The Rules of Backyard Cricket hits all other cricket books I’ve read to date for six. This tale is not just about cricket, it’s about the good, the bad and the ugly and a timely story, too, with sporting integrity often in question.As Serong warns, if you make your own rules in sport and in life, there will always be consequences.

Serong's book is quite brilliant. Many an author has tried to marry the plot of a thriller or a crime novel with a sporting background. And just about everyone has failed. But Serong's is one of the great novels written about sport. If you're into sport, if you're into crime fiction, or if you're just into writing, then take this book away on holiday with you. It is a treat.

To judge by the stock in bookshops, there is a lot more fictional crime than true crime. Yet the latter, of course, provides the essential fodder for the former, if often intensified into worse horrors than those that occurred.The four very good books considered here draw on crimes familiar from recent and long-ago headlines: identity theft and embezzlement (Nathan Besser, Man in the Corner); the abduction and murder of an infant by two older children (June Jago, The Wrong Hand); match-fixing in cricket (Jock Serong, The Rules of Backyard Cricket); and rape, together with the erasure and recovery of memory (American author Wendy Walker, All is Not Forgotten).Apart from Serong’s, these are first novels by authors who are (as he is) acutely and intelligently attuned to the damage to families and communities of inexplicable, unexpected violence and mania, or of the slower and sour corrosion of bonds that is engendered by deceit