The one thing that you can guarantee about all thrillers that work is that somewhere along the line the good guys you care about are going to be seriously threatened by the bad guys that you hate.

In John Grisham's The Appeal, the damage has mostly been done in the past, by the money-grabbing corporation, Krane Chemical which has so poisoned the groundwater in the little Mississippi town of Bowmore that nearly half the population is dead or dying.

But from the outset the bad guys are on the run, thanks to the unstinting efforts of the Paytons, a small “mom-and-pop” legal firm which has sued on behalf of a widow who lost husband and son, and won ruinous punitive damages on her behalf.

Krane is also on the run - in the Wall Street sense - with its shares sliding ruinously and the minor vultures of the legal profession gathering the names of minor victims for a class action to dissect the corpse.

Unfortunately Wes and Mary Grace Payton are such home-loving, church-going, self-sacrificing, downright decent lawyers that it's easy to imagine that they exist only in the fairytale world of good guys and bad guys that Grisham fantasises about.

They almost want to make you love the bad guys: led by the multibillionaire Carl Trudeau with his phony friends, trophy wife, outsize ego and larger yacht, and the bulk of shares in Krane Chemical. So you have to smile when through an unscrupulous intermediary and corrupt friends in Congress, Trudeau sets up an even more home-loving, church-going small time lawyer to stand for the state's Supreme Court in the hope of overturning the verdict on appeal.

If the characters are clear-cut black and white, the electoral battlefield is anything but as Grisham displays his knowledge of a corruptible system to all but turn the plot of his previous bestseller King of Torts on its head.

This is a plea for an end to playing politics within the American justice system, pointing out that big business should answer to the public, not the people whose political advertisements it pays for. The characters play their part but it is the momentum of the message that keeps you flicking the pages.

With Simon Kernick, we are on altogether different ground. Kernick's people are chiselled from life, London life, and usually low-life. As in his previous rollercoaster hit Relentless, Deadline packs a punch from the outset, when the genteel spa owner Andrea Devern finds her 14-year-old daughter missing and a telephone caller asking for half a million pounds to return her alive.

Her husband is also unaccountably missing. In despair, she turns to a hard case from her past life, an ex-con in Spain. And when that goes disastrously wrong, she turns to the policeman with whom she once had a fling. She tells each that her kidnapped child is his daughter too, and both men care more than they might.

Kernick is the master of the literary rabbit punch, thumping his readers when they least expect it, and from a different direction.

The good guys and bad guys are all here, but it's not that easy working out which are which. Cracking stuff.

The Appeal by John Grisham
Century, £12.99 Buy the book here

Deadline by Simon Kernick
Bantam, £6.99 Buy the book here

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