Framed

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I don’t even know what I mean by that except to say that the whole story was very male-oriented which I suppose is to be expected when we only really follow the story from Frankie’s point of view. He always swore to his mum he'd keep his younger, wilder brother out of trouble, but when Jack turns up at the club, covered in someone else's blood, and with the cops hard on his heels, Frankie has no choice but to enter the sordid world of bent coppers, ruthless mobsters and twisted killers he's tried all his life to avoid.

With an absent mother and a father in jail, it falls on Frankie to try and help prove Jack's innocence. I really enjoyed this - I thought the the colourful language was in-keeping with the scene he’s putting on the page, and the structure is like one of Ronnie’s awesome breaks - more or less in the bag, but with some unexpected twists and turns along the way. This is a reputation I haven't exactly helped since I became the world's leading expert on the literary career of Steve Bruce.There’s a particular scene where Frankie is trying to interrogate someone, Ronnie goes on to say that Jack, Frankie’s brother, had asked he question - impossible given where Jack is! Yes there are a few things that have been introduced in this book that I am sure we will be revisiting in subsequent books but this opener didn't waste time and words in over complicating things. But in the dog-eat-dog underworld of 1990s Soho - as a vicious gang war rages between London's two foremost crime families - will Frankie be tough enough, and smart enough to come out on top?

That particular author's bizarre and turgid novels introduced me to the adventures of football manager Steve Barnes and, more broadly, the strange, fascinating, even worrying world of professional sportsmen's vanity literature. METRO on RUNNING RUNNING is a chaotic race through O'Sullivan's life, but this does little to dethrone him as the people's champion - it simply adds further to his legend. It stars Frankie James – like Barnes, an author surrogate for O'Sullivan himself – a smart, capable guy from a colourful background, who is jostled from his day job running a snooker club so he can investigate a murder for which his hapless younger brother has been implicated. Overall as a gangland thriller almost, Frames does lack the punch of a Martina Cole or Jessie Keane novel but as an enjoyable thriller in its own right it is definitely a book that I can recommend and I am excited to read the sequel.What follows is Frankie’s quest to clear his brother’s name and find out who was ultimately responsible. Frankie gets himself into lots of scrapes and some unfortunate situations as the story progresses and I actually believed in him as a character and wanted him to find those answers and come out on top. I found myself coming back to it and wanting to get through to the next chapter to see what was coming next. Some readers might raise an eyebrow at the use of the label ‘athlete’ in the previous sentence, but I think here it is accurate — the new Masters champion Mark Allen once revealed in a mid-session-ask-the-stars-time-filler that his least favourite food was ‘vegetables’ and his favourite ‘takeaways’, but Ronnie O’Sullivan ran 40-45 miles a week before a dodgy heel forced him to cut down. The books featured on this site are aimed primarily at readers aged 13 or above and therefore you must be 13 years or over to sign up to our newsletter.