DESPERATE Housewives in Argentina – Thursday Night Widows (�7.99, Bitter Lemon) is a funny, engrossing and beautifully written social commentary about a group of wealthy women living in a gated community on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. Virginia Guevara

DESPERATE Housewives in Argentina - Thursday Night Widows (�7.99, Bitter Lemon) is a funny, engrossing and beautifully written social commentary about a group of wealthy women living in a gated community on the outskirts of Buenos Aires.

Virginia Guevara is an estate agent who specialises in selling properties in the country club-estate of Cascade Heights. She knows pretty much all there is to know about her neighbours.

Her circle of friends are led by Teresa and El Tano Scaglia.

Mariana Andrade has two adopted children and a husband, Ernesto, who is ostensibly a lawyer but may not be.

Carla Masotta is beaten by husband Gustavo.

Lala and Martin Urovich talk about moving to Miami.

Their lives revolve around games of tennis, dinner parties and the comings and goings of their neighbours. The locked gates of the Heights, complete with security guards, shield them from the crime, poverty and filth outside.

But the Scaglias and their friends hide secrets of infidelity, financial problems, drug use and alcoholism.

And after the 9/11 Twin Towers atrocity in New York, the world's economy begins to destabilise, their husbands lose their jobs and their idyllic lifestyles are under threat. Then tragedy strikes.

The book starts with the tragedy, then goes back to see what leads up to it, in short chapters told by various of the women.

Thursday Night Widows is the first of best-selling author Claudia Pineiro's crime novels to be translated into English.

It is also being turned into a film in Argentina.

- LINDSAY JONES