She will cheerfully bed any number of lovers while away on an oil rig her lies backed up by her team

She will cheerfully bed any number of lovers while away on an oil rig (her lies backed up by her team) but despite her longing for freedom she never packs her bags to grasp it. However hopeless and feckless Geoffrey is, there are his two children to bring up, a job which takes 20 years of her life and much of her income. Second wives and stepmothers are not always the heartless, murderous characters of folk lore – or are they?Fine is never more enjoyable than when depicting strong, flawed characters, and Tilly is one of her best. Her novels are powered by fury, the kind of hilarious, raging honesty inspired when people get too close to the stuff of each other’s lives and can’t disentangle themselves. It is a peculiarly English rage, which all too many polite, intelligent people in this overcrowded country feel but don’t express, and although Fine’s conversational style seems so direct as to be almost crude, it bristles with wit and a surprising degree of sensitivity. All her work, both for adults and children, is concerned with how evil and danger seep into what should be a loving family or community, and how it may be cast out again.

Sometimes, as in Mrs Doubtfire, the result is anguished comedy and sometimes, as in the magnificent Tulip Touch, about a friendship between two girls which deteriorates into real wickedness, it takes a gothic turn. Her protagonists tend to be friendless, locked in a single all-important relationship they lack the strength to free themselves from.Raking the Ashes is one of Fine’s blackest comedies, with the children’s perception that our narrator is dangerous proving all too true. You read Tilly’s story with the same appalled interest as you listen to the tale of a friend’s impossible marriage: incredulous, sympathetic, indignant and secretly delighted by the spectacle of so much folly going up in smoke. In Britain, we are suspicious of the notion that people in the public eye might be good at – wait for it – more than one thing.

Yet Mark Lawson, the Philosopher-King of Newsnight Review, has produced the best fictional riff on the Thatcher years so far (Bloody Margaret) and a tight, elliptical thriller about the pre-Hutton BBC (Going Out Live), in addition to his debut, Idlewild, a beautiful political phantasmagoria about JFK and Marilyn. His mind failing, his political authority haemorrhaging, his paranoia triumphant, the Prime Minister looks out over a London that seems to be spiralling beyond democratic control. What happened is that they pulled into a petrol station in New Jersey, and, while Jack was in the shop, Anne and their maroon station wagon disappeared. A chilling presence clings to the Sinatra myth that no chronicler can ignore.It would be more of a surprise if Frank Sinatra and the Mafia had not been involved with each other. Indeed, as this biography uncovers and makes clear for the first time, if Sinatra was blessed with a golden voice, he was also born cursed.

The origins of his Mafia connection had been put in place before he had even been born. Sinatra’s father, the authors reveal, lived on the same street and was baptised in the same Sicilian church as Charles “Lucky” Luciano, the future capo di tutti capi of organised crime in America. For her part Frank’s mother, Dolly, came from a family of freelance loansharks and armed robbers who graduated to bootlegging for a Luciano underling in New Jersey. When their only child wasn’t skiving off school with streetgangs in Hoboken, Frank did his homework amid mobsters at the bar of his father’s speakeasy.It is tempting, at this point, to explain Sinatra’s subsequent career through mob connections But that doesn’t explain his appeal. Kitty Kelley, for instance, devotes over 500 pages to Sinatra’s links to the Mafia in her 1986 biography, with less than half a dozen pages expended on his singing. Summers and Swan try to redress that balance and what distinguishes this biography is their insistence that you can’t separate sin from Sinatra, that you can’t divorce the heavenly voice from the underworld friends.At the same time that he bunked off school, Sinatra applied himself to music, both popular and classical. Aged 15, after a Bing Crosby concert, he told a friend: “Most people think he’s a crooner They’re wrong He’s a troubadour.