Something's fishy this week Power Play by Mike Nicol (Umuzi) R210Local crime seldom gets more hard-boiled than this - and it's as current as tomorrow's headlines. A female investigator, Krista Bishop, who runs a private security agency, is commissioned to guard some Chinese businessmen and she is plunged headlong into a vicious turf war with Cape Flats gangsters over abalone poaching. Great dialogue and a cracking pace.The issueCorruption and Fifa, they say, are synonymous. But how is it that its president, Sepp Blatter, manages to stay out of trouble, when all around his executives seem to sink in a quagmire of backhanders, dirty deals and graft?The best book on Fifa's labyrinthine organisation and politics is possibly Alan Tomlinson's Fifa (Fédération Internationale de Football Association): The Men, the Myths and the Money (Routledge). Tomlinson is a professor of leisure studies at the University of Brighton and he spent 26 years researching and developing this work, which was published last year. During all that time he was not granted a single interview by Blatter - which says a lot about Blatter.It is thanks to Blatter, Tomlinson writes, that in 2010 and 2011 Fifa got more media exposure, and for all the wrong reasons, than it had had in its history.Tomlinson's book includes this wonderful quote from a Uefa executive: "Fifa's now so corrupt that it no longer knows that it is being corrupt." Perhaps Danny Jordaan should bear that it mind.A racier book on the subject is Foul! The Secret World of Fifa: Bribes, Vote Rigging and Ticket Scandals (HarperSport) by Andrew Jennings. Published in 2007, five will get you ten that an updated edition is in the works.Jennings, whose insider reporting on how South Africa won the 2010 bid is fascinating, claimed last week that Safa officials knew about the bribes but kept quiet.As he put it in an interview with SABC News: "So South Africa, who weren't taking money, who weren't taking bribes, but (knew) they never said a word . I had the feeling when South Africa was bidding that they weren't paying, that there was an instruction in the government, 'We don't pay - you either like us and come here or you don't.' And I know the South African government - in secret - hired a private investigator to look into Fifa and see if anybody was paying anybody and he came out with a view that South Africa wasn't paying."The bottom line"I had come to Paris to expand my world, to understand another culture in the intimate way you can only when you immerse yourself in it. But somehow, my world had gotten smaller." - My Paris Dream: An Education in Style, Slang and Seduction in the Great City of the Seine by Kate Betts (Spiegel & Grau)...