A modest cheer for the American author Lisa Gardner, whose Right Behind You (Headline, £12.99) commendably eschews most of the cliches of the crime genre while keeping her ironclad storytelling skills firmly in place.
In addition to Lady Thatcher's own papers, with her famously furious scribblings all over the submissions by ministers and officials, he has quarried the National Archives, Conservative Party and American archives (where he acknowledges some research assistance: otherwise he commendably did most of it himself).
Commendably, he grasped most of the horrors of the Soviet regime straightaway.
WAR in Iraq may bring death and destruction but one feature of most civilian disasters, stress counsellors, will be commendably absent.
Our elected officials have been commendably restrained in their reaction to the most recent attacks.
Even the most ardent Blair-haters will usually concede that he devoted commendably enormous amounts of time and energy driving the peace process.
I suspect that most citizens who have signed up for such efforts honestly (and commendably) believe that they are valiantly protecting the franchise against the elusive scourge of voter fraud.
Also underselling its most antic character is The Legend of Barney Thomson (Icon, 15), a commendably peculiar directorial debut for Robert Carlyle, who also plays the title role of a Glaswegian barber sucked haplessly into a murder spree – like a particularly poor man's Sweeney Todd.
For a Mets fan, he is commendably broad-minded -- he even roots for the Yankees most Octobers, usually from the tranquillity of his Upper East Side sofa, though if he's on duty, he'll hit the stadium.
A lot of prospective theatre-goers do, of course, read the verdicts of the newspaper critics online, but the point is they still gravitate towards the brand names they feel most comfortable with, such as the Guardian, the Telegraph, or indeed the Mail, which, commendably, still takes theatre criticism seriously and resources it properly.
