Death in Holy Orders <br></br>You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again <br></br>Strides <br></br>Spring Flowers. Spring Frost <br></br>The Invention of Clouds

Paperbacks

Death in Holy Orders, by PD James (Penguin, £6.99, 548pp)

"Sand encrusted buttocks, covered in fawn corduroy." More classic English crime (and corpses) from the pen of former Home Office forensic boffin Baroness James. In one of her most complicated plots to date, James sends Commander Adam Dalgleish back to an old childhood haunt – the theological college of St Anselm's – to investigate a sacrilegious murder. As with all good whodunits, the action is confined within the walls of an isolated community. Perched atop a windswept swathe of East Anglican coast, St Anselm's is further cut off when a fallen tree blocks the road. After the first murder (of a well-connected student) it becomes clear that nearly every member of the seminary – from ordinands to priests, visiting lecturers to gardeners – has a motive. Subsequent murders crop up over the course of the novel, further teasing the reader in Cluedo-like fashion as to identity of the candlestick-wielding maniac.

Life in the college provides rich pickings for the theologically minded James. Painting a cosy world of tied cottages, stone-flagged pantries and high-church ritual, the novel is unashamedly nostalgic in its moral stance. A modernising archdeacon gets his comeuppance, and poetry-reading Dalgleish soon falls under the spell of a picture-book rural domesticity where the air smells of "moist earth and apples". Dalgleish may not possess Morse's gruff charm, but the landscape through which he tootles does. It's the kind of old-fashioned detective novel in which policeman still come out with such reassuring corkers as "Have you ever in your life suffered from temporary amnesia?"

You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again, by Julia Phillips (Faber & Faber, £9.99, 610pp)

This dirt-dishing Hollywood producer's memoir raised blood pressures when it was first published, and hasn't lost its entertainment value ten years on. The first woman to win a best picture Oscar (for The Sting), Phillips, who died earlier this year, was in a unique position to chronicle Seventies Tinsel Town, and was duly panned for her unladylike vitriol. As frantic as her own life ("a diet pill, a small amount of coke, two joints, three valium and a glass-and-a-half-of-wine" got her through Oscar night), this overblown account moves from ocean-front parties to studio lunches with no details spared. Barbra Streisand's eyes "do go in different directions"; Goldie Hawn is "borderline dirty", and Joan Didion's medicine cabinet is a junkie's paradise.

Strides, by Stephen Foster (Faber & Faber, £6.99, 256pp)

A book about trousers and dating: the men in Foster's sartorially self-conscious novel spend more time shopping than their prospective mates. Winger, the chatty narrator, is an expert on leg wear: the lie of the fly, the fit of the hips, the perils of jogging pants. When he makes it out of his bedroom into the Real World (of snooker-playing babes and candle-lit bathrooms) he finds that love, like bottom gear, can come in many shapes and sizes. Off-the-peg musings on life as a hip, happening male.

Spring Flowers. Spring Frost, by Ismail Kadare, trans. David Bellos (Harvill, £9.99, 182pp)

You're Albania's leading novelist, fêted around the world for your cunning parables and chronicles, but forced into exile in Paris in 1990. Then communism collapses, and in place of the longed-for democracy, what do you get? Bandits, con-men, mystics, liars – and that's just the government. Time to laugh, or cry? Kadare's pacey, surreal but (at bottom) heart-broken tragi-comedy does both. A young artist in an Albanian mountain town discovers that the new order means not progress but a flight into the bloody past of myths and feuds, with the "abrupt discovery of things that had been buried deep since time immemorial". Gleefully told fables and legends – from Oedipus to the woman who married a snake – lighten the leap into the middle ages.

The Invention of Clouds, by Richard Hamblyn (Picador, £7.99, 291pp)

Exactly 200 years ago, amateur weather-watcher Luke Howard classified the clouds and started a Romantic cult. The (literally) nebulous poetry of cirrus, stratus and cumulus fed the imagination of writers and painters as well as meteorologists, from Goethe and Constable to Ruskin. Hamblyn (justly shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize) brings solid fact to their airy meditations. This is an impeccable example of the art of telling cultural and scientific history through a lost but fascinating life.