BILL CLINTON made much of the fact that he came from “a small town named Hope”. How he must have wished there had been a small town just a few miles down the road - home to George W. Bush - with the name of Despair.

Thank heavens for fiction, therefore. In his latest Jack Reacher adventure Nothing to Lose, Lee Child - a Briton gone native in America - has Hope and Despair named for the emotions felt in turn by settlers heading west across Colorado towards the unreachable Rocky Mountains.

For Reacher, however, nothing is unreachable, not even the dark secrets hiding under the toxic skin of Despair's paranoid factory town community and its walled-off recycling facility. Reacher falls in with an attractive female cop - from Hope, of course - and uncovers a conspiracy that goes to the heart of the Iraq War.

An unusually political novel, this is as gripping and readable as any in the Reacher series. My one problem with it is Reacher, the all-American action-man hero who allegedly inspires envy in male readers and lust in females.

Unfortunately I find him a socially dysfunctional, second-rate Superman addicted to burgers and coffee and without the vulnerabilities posed by Lois Lane and kryptonite.

In Steel Witches Patrick Lennon's hero Tom Fletcher is also a former policeman now struggling to make a living as a private investigator in his native Cambridgeshire, deeply disillusioned with the force he belonged to.

He is also troubled by his own family, not least when the father he hasn't heard from in 18 years suddenly calls up and tells him “we have to kill” an unknown man, who turned out to be an American ex-serviceman tied up with a high-profile defence firm.

Fletcher finds the man's body and discovers that a bright girl physicist who moonlights as a call girl has gone missing, and had a picture of him as a child on her desk.

A few of the author's inventions - fictional place names and colleges - jar, but beyond that this is a richly imaginative follow-up to Lennon's debut novel Corn Dolls that could just possibly turn Tom Fletcher into another Morse.

Nothing to Lose by Lee Child
Bantam, £17.99; 432pp

Steel Witches by Patrick Lennon
Hodder and Stoughton, £19.99; 320pp

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