Put your feet up with these legal crackers

THE MAGISTRATE'S TALEBy Trevor GroveBloomsbury, 14.99

THE BIRD TABLEBy Jonathan DaviesLittle Brown, 16.99

PORTRAIT OF A KILLERBy Patricia CornwallTime Warner, 17.99

THE GREAT BRITISH TORSO MYSTERYBy Richard Whittington-EganThe Bluecoat Press, Liverpool 7.99

JUSTICEBy Dominick DunneTime Warner, 6.99

BOLD AS A LIONBy JP BeanD& D Publications, 9.95

James Morton

In 1998, Trevor Grove wrote The Juryman's Tale, a riveting account of his days and weeks on a jury in a kidnapping and demanding money with menaces case at the Old Bailey.

Since then, he has branched out as a lay magistrate.

The Magistrate's Tale is what he describes as a frontline account of his first two years as a justice of the peace in north London.

Mr Grove is atypical of many of his colleagues.

As a journalist writing a book, he has had more opportunity to visit and meet with magistrates around the countryside than most, something which produces a degree of self-satisfaction.

There cannot be many who had last met the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Woolf, 'eating grilled flying fish on a moonlit beach in Barbados'.

His Lordship chuckled at the recollection.

Interspersed with the interviews, training sessions and visits to prison are the impressions of cases from the courts at which he sat.

He must have been constrained by what he wrote but these snippets are essentially frustrating.

Were, for example, the magistrates right to give bail to a man who had served lengthy sentences when he was accused of burgling a house in which the occupants were sleeping? We never learn and this rather spoils things.

The players flit on to the page and are gone.

It may be what happens in a magistrates' court but this makes the book something of a disappointment.

With its foreword by Lord Justice Auld, and notes of how to apply to become a magistrate, there are also signs of special pleading: 'We really are good people doing the country a good turn, freely giving up hours of our time in the service of the public saving money as we do so.

Come and join us.'

After a mere two years, there are already unhealthy signs of a condescending attitude creeping in.

Many of the defendants and their witnesses are described for the amusement they provide.

Lawyers reading Mr Grove's always entertaining account may remain unconvinced that the lay magistrates' court represents their best venue for trial.

After a couple of years' silence, Jonathan Davies has produced The Bird Table, the fourth in his corking series featuring his barrister hero, Jeremy Scott.

This time, Mr Davies has tackled the subject of date rape.

Scott defends in a case involving an alleged attack on a leading barrister and as a result, unsurprisingly, he incurs the opprobrium of his colleagues.

However, Scott thrives on difficult cases but nothing legally, morally or socially comes that easily for him.

Mr Davies handles the court scenes with the skill of one who knows what the rules, written and unwritten, really are.

The Bird Table is a genuine page-turner.

The immensely popular novelist Patricia Cornwall has turned her hand to detective work and has, to her satisfaction anyway, conclusively solved the identity of Jack the Ripper.

It is no secret that she has identified Walter Sickert in Portrait Of A Killer and the book is her case against the artist.

It is not the first time his name has been in the frame.

The last time was in the 1980s and then the theory was discredited.

Ms Cornwall stakes her case on DNA evidence from letters on Public Record Office files.

But in this case, laymen, let alone lawyers, might think the DNA does not stand up.

Nor can she place Sickert in England at the time of the murders.

She also has a theory that a fistula on which he was operated early in his life was a penile one, something which soured him towards women.

Unfortunately, while there is evidence of the fistula, she cannot prove it was a penile one, so that theory is a bit patchy.

She rather works on the basis that since she cannot prove he was not, therefore he must have been.

It may - something I doubt - be cogent evidence in the US, but here Jeremy Scott would have a field day defending.

Many British murder cases are every bit as fascinating as the Ripper but have not stayed in the limelight.

Veteran crimewriter Richard Whittington-Egan has uncovered one of them.

In its heyday at the end of the 1930s, after the body of an unknown man was found on the banks of the Severn, followed swiftly by the death of gigolo Brian Sullivan, it was known as the Case of the Sawn-up Man, and the Case of a Thousand Clues.

Readers of the Sunday papers were enthralled for weeks on end as the story involved all things some think make life worth living - sex, society, blackmail, and an abortion racket thrown in.

The case was never solved but Whittington-Egan shuffles the pack of clues most entertainingly and lays out some well-argued conclusions in The Great British Torso Mystery.

The novelist Dominick Dunne is qualified to write about criminal trials.

His daughter was murdered and her killer was sentenced to six-and-a-half years, and released in less than three.

The first part of Justice is his perspective of that trial, but he then looks at some of the other trials, mostly American, of the past few decades.

OJ, of course, is included but there are several less well-known cases.

Mr Dunne is an elegant and observant writer and the pieces make for a most entertaining if disturbing critique of the US judicial system.

Finally, nothing really to do with the law, except that the hero, the prizefighter William Bendigo, must have made many more appearances in court than most is JP Bean's Bold as a Lion, an account of the Nottingham-born boxer's rise to fame in the prize ring and his subsequent fall and rehabilitation.

It is a well-researched social history of the mid-Victorian period quite apart from being a good story of Bendigo's career.