Scoop; by Kuldip Nayar.

A worthy read for those interested in the region and the history. Nayar was close to centres of power and able to find scoops and talk to people, and more importantly have people talk to him. If his objectivity is only 99 percent, that is more than most others achieve.

The Associate; by John Grisham.

It begins with a pit of fear growing in the protagonist, and one of fear and disgust in the reader, what with the men who blackmail him as he finishes coaching underprivileged kids at sport as a social conscience duty, about to return to his room at Yale law school, and with every step thereafter it is a contest between him to keep his head clear and them to have him in their sights. The boy is intelligent and generally good, and really has not done anything wrong but a seeming wrong and the evidence thereof that can be fabricated is often damning enough, and his career, his life is at stake. How he manages to stay clean nevertheless is the story, and the astounding end is all too plausible these days.

This time Grisham abandons his favourite old ending - that of innocent victims and witnesses on the run hiding from criminals in islands in Caribbean or elsewhere. Not everyone can, especially when your career and qualifications are well defined and not in multiple directions. This time the protagonist takes another, more dangerous perhaps, route - with good reasoning he gives clearly.

Very readable and more, as all Grisham works are, but a bit unsatisfactory in that it leaves one at every chapter feeling he could have written more, made it more detailed and filled out. This one is barely a sketch compared to some of his earlier works. A good one, but still, unsatisfactorily bare.