The Second Girl by David Swinson (Mulholland Books) R285HABIT-FORMING CRACKERThe Second Girl by David Swinson (Mulholland Books) R285An assured debut from former cop Swinson and a pacy introduction to a new crime series, albeit one with a novel twist in a complex protagonist: Frankie Marr is a Washington private eye with a dirty secret - he's a high-functioning drug addict who has devoted much of his skills to hiding his cocaine habit from his peers.When he accidentally discovers and frees a kidnapped teenage girl in a drug gang's den, Marr is hailed as a hero and thrust uncomfortably into the limelight. Then a second girl goes missing, and he reluctantly agrees to look into the matter. Hugely entertaining, and furiously paced.THE ISSUEThe investigation into Moscow's state-sponsored doping scandal is likely to place extraordinary pressure on the Olympic organisers to ban the entire Russian team from Rio 2016. The games are, of course, no stranger to controversy; on one hand, they're a showcase for human athletic achievement and, on the other, a base exhibition of megalomania and brute nationalism.Sportswriter David Goldblatt's new book, The Games: A Global History of the Olympics (Macmillan), exposes a sorry litany of corruption, doping, cheating and rotten politics.The rot started with Jim Thorpe, an American who won gold medals in the decathlon and pentathlon in 1912 at Stockholm. A year later, he was stripped of his medals and his name was removed from the record books.His sin? He had once been paid to play baseball - thus violating the games' rigidly "gentlemanly amateur" ethos: no professionals and, for a while, no women (for decades they were confined to "decorative" pursuits such as croquet, tennis, archery and golf).The International Olympic Committee also went to great lengths to keep politics out of the games. It ignored calls to boycott the 1936 Berlin games, and washed its hands of such atrocities as the massacre by soldiers of 250 protesters shortly before the 1968 Mexico City games and the murder of 11 Israeli athletes in Munich in 1972. The games must go on.For a while, the IOC managed to fend off attempts to bar South Africa from the games, but by the 1960s and 1970s, Goldblatt writes, "an influx of new members, and a recognition of the post-colonial inequalities and injustices within the Olympic movement, would explode in sustained and very visible conflicts over apartheid and American civil rights".At the same time, the games became, thanks to the Soviet Union's efforts, a major sporting front in the wider cultural Cold War.For all intents and purposes, the spirit of "gentlemanly amateurism and apolitical internationalism" was now over.BOTTOM LINE"A bad feminist? A traitor to her sex? A retro geisha? Aw, pippy-poo, as Helen would say. In her view she was merely being realistic ." - Not Pretty Enough: The Unlikely Triumph of Helen Gurley Brown by Gerri Hirshey (Sarah Crichton Books)..