Five-Finger Discount<br></br>King Of Cannes<br></br>The Trial Of Henry Kissinger<br></br>Elements Of Italy<br></br>Mistress Of Charlecote<br></br>

Paperbacks

Five-Finger Discount by Helene Stapinski (Bloomsbury, £7.99, 260pp)

The urgent thump of The Sopranos' theme echoes in your head as you're swept up by Helene Stapinski's grimy, graphic and (until the last pages) admirably unsentimental depiction of her New Jersey family. Told in zappy, staccato prose, her tale begins with her grandfather, no genial, silver-haired old buffer, but a murderous bully who prompted a headline in The Jersey Journal: MAN SEIZED ON WAY TO KILL 5 CHILDREN. One of them was the author.

According to Stapinski, the fact that grandpa worked as a security guard in a local museum "says a lot about Jersey City's patronage system". Facing Manhattan across the Hudson, Jersey City was the first stopping-off point for two-thirds of the immigrants from Ellis Island. Its endemic corruption was characterised by its violent mayor Frank Hague, who ruled for three decades until 1948. Stapinski's ancestral history is punctuated by murders, beatings and scams ranging from a self-shooting to ice-cream that was mostly air.

As a child, she dined on lobster and steak filched by her father. "Everybody stole," she writes. "It was no big deal." Her litany of family malfeasance culminates in 1988, when her cousin Gerri swindled an employer out of $219,792.55. Along with the sleaze, Stapinski conveys the occasional pleasures and noxious pongs of her seedy hometown. Though notorious crimes are still abundant, she maintains the place is picking up: "On a clear, sunny day, Jersey City didn't look quite as bad as I remembered."

King Of Cannes by Stephen Walker (Bloomsbury, £7.99, 278pp)

This high-velocity, gag-packed caper is about four filmmakers pitching projects at Cannes Film Festival. while Walker attempts to make a BBC film about them. We learn the wacky titles (Chopper Chicks in Zombie Town), the one-line pitches ("It's like Trainspotting meets The Sound of Music") and rather more than we need to know about the author's constipation – and this is all before Walker reaches Cannes. Once there, his main protégés prove to be hilariously inept, while Walker reveals that pretending to film when you're not is "an honourable BBC tradition, like not paying your licence fee".

The Trial Of Henry Kissinger by Christopher Hitchens (Verso, £8, 161pp)

"An odious schlump [stupid person] who made war gladly." This view comes from Joseph Heller's 1976 novel Good as Gold, but Kissinger the cold-eyed maestro of realpolitik has avoided scrutiny until now. Supported by a host of documentation, Hitchens implicates him in crimes ranging from prolonging the Vietnam War ("the single wickedest act in the history of the republic") to mass murder and the only assassination carried out in Washington by a foreign regime. What he doesn't include is the proposal, made at the height of Kissinger's eminence, to change the US Constitution so citizens not born in America could become President.

Elements Of Italy by Lisa St Aubin de Teran (Virago, £7.99, 277pp)

This sparkling commonplace book is packed with acute perceptions from both visitors (Byron: "They make love a great deal – and assassinate a little") and natives (Lampedusa: "Sicilians never want to improve ... they think themselves perfect"). Jonathan Keates reminds us of Milan's amazing railway station ("For sheer moral education, there are few places like it on earth"), while Henry James should have been hired by Thomas Cook: "May in Venice is better than April, but June is best of all." One quibble: De Teran's division of entries according to the four ancient elements is no substitute for the lack of contents page or index.

Mistress Of Charlecote by Mary Elizabeth Lucy (Orion, £6.99, 4180pp)

Mary Elizabeth Lucy (1803-1889) was the chatelaine of this wonderfully unspoilt Elizabethan hall in Warwickshire. Written for her grandchildren, these lively and vivid memoirs bring the era to life, especially the fragility of Victorian infancy. Other details show that things haven't changed so much. The author recalls a casual rudeness ("You are no chicken") after 30 years and the daunting cost (16s 6d) of a 10-mile journey in Scotland. A burglary strikes a familiar chord, though – unlike now – the perpetrators were caught. One got 15 years transportation, the other got 10. "The light sentence surprised the prisoners as indeed it did all in court."