NEW non-fiction includes One Blood: Inside Britain's New Street Gangs by John Heale (published in paperback by Simon & Schuster, £12.99), which is a study of UK gangland warfare which could not come at a more appropriate time.

More than 20 teenagers have been shot or stabbed in London alone this year, making the book a very apropos read indeed. But, while it promises to give an "inside look"

into the nation's problematic gang culture - much of it manned by knife and gun-wielding disaffected youths - one never really gets the sense that we are any closer to understanding the so-called social ill than when we started.

Having trailed a bewildering number of gangs across the UK, many of them in London and some of them down my street, the journalist author has definitely done his homework, proved by the fascinatingly distanced first-hand accounts of the gang members themselves.

But so many superfluous names are mentioned and details examined, that the brain struggles to understand the main point. If this is meant to be an "abiding portrait of an unfortunate section of British society", it succeeds instead in reinforcing the class divisions between fortunate and unfortunate, rich and poor, black and white.

More police are definitely not the answer - but just what is, is still unknown.

Kate Hodal

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The Terminal Spy: The Life and Death of Litvinenko by Alan Cowell (published in hardback by Doubleday, £16.99) recalls the picture of the stricken, hairless former KGB officer dying in a London hospital bed.

One of the most memorable images of recent times, the photograph was taken on November 20, 2006, three days before he died in excruciating pain from polonium-210 - one of the world's rarest and deadliest radioactive isotopes.

Barely three weeks earlier, he had sipped tea with some fellow countrymen in a Mayfair hotel before falling violently ill at home later that night.

Litvinenko's deathbed testament defiantly blamed Russian premier Vladimir Putin for his demise, the precise cause of which was only confirmed several days later. But as Cowell's brilliantly gripping narrative details, the dissident had any number of other enemies.

Taking in cut-throat post-communist Moscow, the rise of the Russian oligarchs and the dramatic police investigation into Litvinenko's death, the book is a true-life tale that would make John le Carre and Frederick Forsyth go weak at the knees.

Matt Dickinson

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The Death of Captain Cook - A Hero Made and Unmade by Glyn Williams (published in hardback by Profile Books, £15.99) places one of Britain's great national heroes of the past under the spotlight and he does not emerge from the scrutiny smelling entirely of roses.

Captain James Cook (1728-1779), navigator, explorer and cartographer, who grew up in Great Ayton, redrew the map of the world after a number of perilous voyages into the unknown.

His weeks on the east coast of Australia at Botany Bay in 1770 resulted in him being lauded in later years as the founding father of that nation, though he had never suggested the region as a possible colony, and explorers from other countries had visited it before him.

With forensic skill, Williams separates fact from fiction in relation to Cook, especially his death in Hawaii, when he was clubbed to death by local men. In England and elsewhere, subsequent published accounts of his end prove that "spin" about public figures was already around more than 200 years ago.

Anthony Looch