JOYCE Carol Oates' books are like buses. You wait for ages for one to come along and then three turn up at once.

In the last few months this best-selling Princeton professor has produced a trio of cracking good reads. The first two, I'll Take You There and the novella Beasts, were literary explorations of American collegiate life in the 1950s and 70s. Her third offering, The Barrens, which she wrote as Rosamond Smith - one of her numerous pen names - is a superior thriller with a fascinating main character whose personality unravels as quickly as the plot.

This is not so much a whodunit - the reader soon becomes all too aware of which weirdo to watch out for - as a why they did it and how on earth do they think they will get away with it.

With her typical panache and literary style, the author comes at the serial killer genre from a new angle. Neither the murderer nor his victims are at the centre of her story. Instead she chooses to focus on an outsider, someone with no real connection to the crimes, who should be a bit-part player but soon proves to be the real star of the show.

Unlike the desolate New Jersey Pine Barrens of the title, Joyce Carol Oates' tricksy thriller is full of life, colour and character.

Updated: 10:37 Wednesday, June 04, 2003