A world elsewhere

British writers, foreign settings

In a very short time, STAV SHEREZ has become established as one of the most idiosyncratic and entertaining of crime writers. In The Devil’s Playground, the mutilated body of a tramp is found in a park in Amsterdam, and Dutch copper Ronald Van Hijn thinks he has found another victim of the serial killer currently plying his trade in the city. From material on the body, the canny detective tracks down a man called Reed, who gave the vagrant shelter in London some time before. Reed becomes as intrigued as Van Hijn when he discovers that the encounter he had with the dead man was no accident, and begins to uncover the victim’s secret life – one that stretches back to the grimmest events of the Second World War. As a debut thriller, this is something special – the assurance with which the baffling narrative is dispatched by Sherez seems more like the work of a seasoned pro than a tyro novelist. Both Reed and Van Hijn are persuasively realised characters, and the final revelations involving the Nazi death camps have considerable force. The more recent Eleven Days is a demonstration of just how consistently Sherez has maintained his very high standards. And a final encomium: his work is subtly and pleasurably different from that of his confrères.

If you relish that delicious chill of fearful anticipation while reading a thriller, The Farm by TOM ROB SMITH will be right up your alley. The young author’s debut novel Child 44 burst upon readers with the impact of a grenade, and that riveting tale of an investigator in Stalin’s Russia led to an inevitable big-budget movie starring Tom Hardy and Gary Oldman. Smith has perhaps struggled with subsequent offerings to recapture the impact of that first book, but The Farm is quite unlike his earlier period novels and takes a very different direction. We are no longer in the totalitarian Russia of the past, but moving between modern-day London and Sweden – Smith is in fact half-Swedish, and is able to draw on his personal legacy. This is a literary thriller with penetrating psychological undertones.

Daniel has imagined that his parents were leading a comfortable existence on a Swedish farm, until he receives a distressed call from his father. He discovers that his mother has been committed to a mental hospital but has escaped. Then Daniel receives a second phone call, this time from his fugitive mother who is making her way to London and desperate for him to hear her side of the story. Daniel’s problems are acute: is his mother the victim of a massive conspiracy as she claims? Or was his father right to commit her to an asylum? As the canny reader might imagine, in a 350-page thriller, it’s not hard to guess which of these two scenarios is the most likely. And as Daniel tries to unpick the truth about the trauma of his family, he learns of a grim crime in which his father may be involved.

To say that Smith has moved his writing on to a new plane of achievement understates the case here, and he finds something new and radical to do with a well-worn thriller device of the past having a devastating effect on the present. There is a keen attention to the conflicts within his troubled hero, as he realises that much of what he believed about his family is a lie, and the consequences of dealing with betrayal and corruption are handled with steely authority. Smith has chosen to write about a gay protagonist here, but The Farm is a novel that can speak to all of us, whatever our sexuality.

Let’s face it, it’s much easier to pick up a thriller by an author whose work we know well, rather than taking a chance on a debut novel by someone we’ve never heard of. But sometimes playing safe is the wrong option – as was proved by ignoring NICK STONE. Mr Clarinet was a book that came weighted down with some heavy pre-publicity hype from his publishers, clearly hoping that Stone would be the Next Big Thing. Certainly, his biography is unusual: born in Cambridge to a Scottish father and Haitian mother, with a great-grandfather who used voodoo remedies, Stone was sent to live in Haiti with his hard-drinking, gun-brandishing grandfather. After university, he was back in Haiti when the country went down another bloody path. But all of this didn’t guarantee that he could turn out a novel as interesting as his life had been. However, a few pages of Mr Clarinet are enough to prove that Nick Stone was indeed the find that his publishers were clearly hoping for. For a start, Stone’s scene-setting is a revelation: a pungent, massive Haitian canvas against which the terrifying narrative plays out. Miami private investigator Max Mingus will pocket $10 million if he can track down Charlie Carver, scion of an extremely rich family. Charlie has gone missing on the island of Haiti, where many young people have disappeared. And it’s here, of course, that Stone is able to make impressive capital from his years in this violent and exotic country. As Max digs ever deeper into the mystery surrounding Charlie Carver, he finds that voodoo is not just a come-on for the tourists in modern Haiti, but an extremely sinister and forceful presence, behind which hovers the mysterious figure of Mr Clarinet, who the natives believe has been luring children away from their families.

All of this is dispatched with great brio by Stone, who never gives the slightest impression of being an apprentice novelist. Many elements are stirred into the heady brew: black magic, Baby Doc Duvalier, the cocaine trade and the incipient civil war in the country among them. Stone even persuasively draws parallels between the 1994 American invasion of Haiti and the then current Iraq situation. If he doesn’t pull together every strand in this ambitious enterprise, few readers will have cause to complain when the experience of reading Mr Clarinet is so exhilarating. More recent work (such as 2014’s legal thriller The Verdict) is less ambitious.

If you’re tiring of the frigid climate of Scandinavian crime fiction, a welcome antidote may be found in JASON WEBSTER’s sultry, and elegantly written, Max Cámara series, of which The Anarchist Detective is the most accomplished. The publishers evoke Donna Leon as a comparison, but Webster is very much his own man, and his dyspeptic Spanish detective is a very different kettle of fish to Leon’s Brunetti. In The Anarchist Detective, Cámara is in an elective exile in Madrid, with a view to cultivating his cordon bleu skills (and enjoying some erotic indulgence with the seductive Alicia). But, of course, the day job exerts its hold again, and he is drawn back to his grim home town of Albacete, a place he has struggled to forget. Back on familiar territory, he is soon knee deep in betrayal, lies and the ugly residue of the Civil War, still poisoning lives.

If the utterly enthralling first volume in JAKE WOODHOUSE’s Amsterdam Quartet, After the Silence, is any indication, this looks set to be one of the key sequences in modern international crime fiction, with Amsterdam itself a major character – as it was in the novels of Nicolas Freeling. The subsequent Into the Night takes readers into the criminal underworld of Amsterdam with Inspector Jaap Rykel. A woman has been pushed under a train by a man in police uniform, sending the citizens of Amsterdam into a frenzy. The situation is further exacerbated by a serial beheader posting pictures of his victims on Twitter. Disturbingly, each victim carries a picture of Jaap, and, as the investigation unfolds, we follow Rykel into a dark world of violence and menace.

Immense popularity can come with a price in the world of books. Dan Brown can shrug off the now-customary dismissal of his writing skills, success being the best revenge. But it is harder if you toil in similar territory further down the bestseller lists and glean the disdain without the remuneration. SIMON TOYNE, thankfully, has largely been spared cutting comments, even though his books are in that familiar mould: breathless, picaresque page-turners with plots underpinned by the threat of some cataclysmic event (in The Tower, strange weather phenomena and mass migrations suggest the End of Days). Toyne must be well aware that there are people who will find such synopses off-putting precisely because of the Da Vinci Code-like associations, but he is no doubt hoping to channel the American writer’s Midas touch. In fact, Toyne deserves it: he may trade in the familiar elements (his Robert Langdon figure is tyro FBI agent Joseph Shepherd), but he delivers his outrageous plot with a far more intelligent use of language than his publishing model.

A catastrophe hits NASA’s deep space search programme – it is wiped clean, replaced by a minatory announcement: ‘Mankind must look no further.’ The warning is greeted with scepticism, but not by the FBI’s Joseph Shepherd, tasked with investigating the destruction of the programme. At the same time, ex-crime reporter Liv Adamsen relocates from the Turkish city of Ruin to an oilfield in Syria. The development is abandoned, but an oasis forms around her new dwelling – along with a nameless danger. All around are suggestions of Armageddon: a hideous plague is beginning to spread (emanating from the citadel in Turkey that Liv Adamsen left behind), and the weather is behaving in a terrifying fashion that cannot be accounted for by global warming. The signs are that all human endeavour is drawing to a close, unless a handful of determined individuals can avert doomsday.

The pleasures of The Tower do not lie in the writing, literate though it is. The author (who worked in television for two decades) knows that in this sort of book sheer narrative gusto is far more valuable than nuance, and everything is presented in poster colours. But that is not a criticism. High-concept thrillers may be ten a penny, but Toyne rises above the competition to deliver something that is both confident and cinematic.

Those in the know (in crime fiction terms) are well aware that MARTIN WALKER’s weathered detective protagonist Bruno is something special. The companionable Walker has an impeccably solid journalistic background and is the author of several acclaimed works of non-fiction, including The Cold War: A History, along with a historical novel, The Caves of Périgord – but none of this guaranteed a winning streak in the crime fiction genre. However, Bruno, Chief of Police proved to be a superb crime debut, full of unusual touches and characterised with great skill. Walker’s hero, Captain Bruno Courrèges, heads a small force in the town of St Denis in the Périgord region of France – which means that Walker could channel elements from his earlier novel set in the region. He is an unorthodox detective: he doesn’t carry the gun he owns, and barely needs to arrest people. But suddenly chaos reigns in the town as inspectors from Brussels target the rural market, making many enemies. Bruno is concerned by the fact that this phenomenon is invoking memories of the town’s ignoble Vichy France past. Then an old man from a North African immigrant family is murdered…

MICHAEL GREGORIO is the joint moniker of a husband-and-wife team: Liverpool-born Michael G Jacob and Italian Daniela De Gregorio. The duo are best known for their highly praised series of Gothic thrillers set in the Prussia of Immanuel Kant – with titles such as Critique of Criminal Reason and Unholy Awakening – but they have recently turned their hand to contemporary crime fiction. In Cry Wolf, the first of a new series, Sebastiano Cangio, a ranger in a national park in idyllic Umbria, sees tell-tale signs of the nightmare he has left behind in his native Calabria. An ‘Ndrangheta mafia clan is moving into the earthquake-torn area, bringing violence, drugs and corruption. In this dramatic, fast-moving tale, Cangio alerts the local authorities, but to no avail. In doing so, he becomes the target not only of the ‘Ndrangheta but also of the greedy politicians and bent cops who are already on the wrong side of the law. Think Wolf is the second novel in the series.

CARLA BANKS’ The Forest of Souls is a powerful and compelling piece of work, in which the heroine is taken to the furthest extremes of human behaviour and forced to confront the darkness at the heart of the soul. Helen Kovacs has been researching the Nazi occupation of Eastern Europe, though she has chosen to keep her research from her close friend Faith Lange. But then Helen is killed, much to Faith’s horror. At first, Faith believes that the police have found the murderer, but then she begins to suspect that the man in custody is not the man who killed her friend. At the same time, the journalist Jake Denbigh has been led to believe that there is more to Helen’s murder than meets the eye; Jake has discovered that, among the supposed concentration camp victims who escaped from Minsk, several war criminals disguised themselves. It would appear that Faith’s much-loved grandfather Marek may be one of these. But who is responsible for Helen’s death? Someone from this dark past, or a totally unexpected (and well-hidden) source. What makes Banks’ novel so forceful is the strength of its dual narrative. As Faith delves into the secrets of her own family, Jake travels to the mass graves in the Kurapaty forest in Minsk, on a related – but even more dangerous – quest. This is psychological thriller writing of a high order.

Crime Writers’ Association Daggers for best crime novel are sometimes controversial, but nobody argued with the award bagged by HENRY PORTER for Brandenburg. This has all the ambition and assurance of Porter’s earlier books, with an even more assiduously realised time and place: the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism. Porter’s protagonist is a Dresden academic who is also an agent for MI6. It’s a richly drawn portrait of an epoch, crammed with authentic detail.

ZOË SHARP created her no-nonsense heroine Charlie Fox after receiving death-threat letters as a photojournalist; Sharp herself, like her heroine, is notably no-nonsense. The series of thrillers, which started with Killer Instinct, sees the resourceful Charlie become a close protection officer working for the man who was her training instructor in the army, and finds her on assignment in a variety of (usually American) settings. Sharp’s US-set work has been nominated for the Edgar, Anthony, Barry, Benjamin Franklin and Macavity Awards in the United States, as well as twice for the Crime Writers’ Association Short Story Dagger.

With its heady mix of Sudanese killers, ruthless and corrupt business types and a biotech firm with blood on its hands, ALEX BLACKMORE’s Lethal Profit is nothing if not busy, but the author manages to keep its labyrinthine plot in apple-pie order. When Jackson Scott vanishes after uncovering some inconvenient facts about a biotech company, it’s up to his sister Eva to track him down. Her investigation begins in Paris, but soon she is immersed in a violent global conspiracy that threatens not just her own life but the lives of many others. This is immensely lively fare, delivered with a skill that belies the fact that this is the author’s first novel.

The inexorable ascent of ROBERT HARRIS as one of the UK’s most important popular novelists has been an unusual phenomenon, quite unlike the career path of most of his peers. His breakthrough book was, of course, the powerful Fatherland in 1992, with its dark alternative view of history, in which Germany was the winning nation in the Second World War. A sequence of striking and genre-bending novels followed, for which the sobriquet ‘thriller’ no longer seemed sufficient: Archangel, Enigma and the much-acclaimed The Ghost, memorably filmed by Roman Polanski. But if there is one thing that has marked out Harris’s career, it is his wholly admirable refusal to be typecast with regard to category. The thriller may be his natural home, but Harris has also shown an immense skill in dealing with historical subjects and the past in impressive novels such as the ambitious Pompeii and Lustrum.

The central character in Harris’s The Fear Index is celebrated in the coteries of the ultra-rich, if unknown to the general public. Dr Alex Hoffmann is a scientist: a genuinely visionary character who can create from computer software the equivalent of what Mahler could spin from the staves on a sheet of music paper. Hoffmann’s genius has been to create a groundbreaking form of artificial intelligence, and, aided by his partner, an investment banker, he has found a way of reading human emotions, facilitating a way of predicting movement in the financial markets – his Geneva hedge fund has already produced billions in profit. But then everything begins to go grimly wrong. Hoffmann, lying asleep with his wife, is unaware of an intruder who has managed to get past the security of their luxurious lake house and who sets in motion a nightmare that, in its vaunting paranoia, makes Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four look like a fairy story. In fact, Orwell’s influence on this characteristically efficient novel is but one element here: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein may similarly be detected (in the form of a creation that achieves autonomy and ends up threatening its creator), and perhaps there is a hint of Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C Clarke’s malign computer HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The pseudonymous AD GARRETT (actually the much-respected crime writer Margaret Murphy and forensic specialist Professor Dave Barclay) made a notable mark with Everyone Lies, a highly individual forensic thriller. And the team’s second book, Believe No One, is (if anything) even better. DCI Kate Simms is on placement in the United States with St Louis PD, reviewing cold cases and sharing expertise with forensic expert Professor Nick Fennimore. A call for help from a rural sheriff’s deputy takes Fennimore to Oklahoma, where he discovers a mother is dead and her child has disappeared – what’s more, they’re not the only ones. How many more young mothers have been killed, and how many children are unaccounted for? There may be serial murders to be unearthed across two continents and two decades. The two British authors travelled to America’s Midwest to research the novel, and their experience of the vastness of the landscape resonates throughout the mesmerising narrative of Believe No One.

The surface brilliance of her highly accomplished thriller is mesmerising enough, but JOANNA HINES’ combination of adroit characterisation and nimble plotting lifts Angels of the Flood above most contemporary crime writing. While the premise is fresh (the heroine, Kate Holland, finds herself drawn into a dangerous mystery after she receives a priceless Italian painting), the real strength of the novel is its vivid evocation of Florence during the disastrous floods (30 years before Kate receives the painting) and the very different Italy of the late 1990s. Hines knows her locales, and her writing is as good as a holiday under Mediterranean skies. Angels of the Flood is something of a treat: an intelligent and original piece of writing.

If you are someone who enjoys being led down the darker alleyways of Italy by DAVID HEWSON, reading Carnival for the Dead will be something of a bittersweet experience. Yes, it’s every bit as atmospheric and engaging as anything in the writer’s Nic Costa series, although another of his favourite characters, forensic pathologist Teresa Lupo, moves centre stage in this book. And, yes, the central mystery is every bit as intriguing, with a solution locked deep in the fabulous artistic heritage of Venice and unravelled with the satisfying precision that we know the author delivers so adroitly. But we may feel a certain sadness, as this was the last of Hewson’s Italian novels.

Beyond the tourist traps of San Marco and the Rialto, the Venetian past leaves shadows invisible to visitors but that are standard terrain for such professionals as Teresa Lupo. As the city is transformed into a magical place by the Carnival, Teresa is investigating the strange disappearance of her aunt Sofia, a lively and unconventional figure. Her search takes her into ever more dangerous territory, and here Hewson tips his hat to some of the great chroniclers of sinister Venice, such as Daphne du Maurier. As so often with Hewson, the tangled history of Italy wreaks a powerful influence on the characters, and the revelations in Carnival for the Dead are as extraordinary as anything the writer delivered previously.

Perhaps the reason for abandoning Italy was that Hewson landed a choice assignment – something of a challenge. He agreed to deliver two books based on the cult Danish TV series The Killing, working with the creative team of the programme and sanctioned by the original writer, Søren Sveistrup. Following the bestselling results, Hewson then set his sights on the Netherlands. The first book in his Amsterdam-based Pieter Vos series, The House of Dolls, has been optioned for Dutch television, and The Wrong Girl, the second in the series, proved to be among his best work. For these books, David Hewson may be taking us into a chillier Northern Europe, but let’s hope that he’ll be stamping his passport in warmer climes again before too long.

CRAIG RUSSELL’s detective Jan Fabel operates in Germany, and a return to duty on the Hamburg murder squad leads to an encounter with a particularly terrifying killer in A Fear of Dark Water, winning kudos from the likes of Mo Hayder. An environmental summit is due to begin in the city when the weather turns turbulent. As the floodwaters disappear, a body is found, decapitated. In his initial investigation, Fabel thinks the dead person was the victim of a serial murderer and rapist who tracks down his prey using social network websites. However, this explanation begins to seem inadequate when the detective’s investigations uncover a clandestine cult with an environmental agenda.

Many non-Italians have chosen to set their crime fiction in Rome, but CONOR FITZGERALD has proved that he is easily the equal of any of his predecessors. In The Dogs of Rome, Arturo Clemente is killed on a hot summer morning in his Rome apartment. He is a man of interest, married to an elected member of the Senate, and worthy of the most intense police investigation. When detective Alec Blume arrives, he finds that a suspect is already in the frame. And when Alec begins to question the accepted view, he discovers (as has many a policeman in Italy before him) that political influences are not to be argued with.

SAUL BLACK (whose real name is Glen Duncan) is another British writer who has the full measure of the US locales in which he sets his tense narratives. The Killing Lessons arrived festooned with cover blurbs from some heavyweight names – Jeffery Deaver, Lee Child and Linwood Barclay – leading readers to assume that the author was American. In a brutal scenario, two killers are behind the rape, torture and murder of seven women in the space of three years, always leaving an inexplicable item inside their victims, such as an apple or a ceramic goose. On their tail is San Francisco homicide detective Valerie Hart, struggling with the bottle. Duncan, before becoming Black, was a literary novelist, and he channels those skills into a well-written entry in an overpopulated genre.

Word-of-mouth approval for any new title is something that publishers desperately seek but are unable to guarantee. His publishers, however, must have been rubbing their hands when the phenomenon kicked in resoundingly for THOMAS MOGFORD’s Shadow of the Rock, which arrived festooned with praise from the likes of William Boyd. Gibraltarian lawyer Spike Sanguinetti comes home to discover old friend Solomon Hassan on his doorstep. The latter is on the run from the police, after being accused of a savage killing in Tangiers. The Moroccan authorities want to extradite him, and Spike agrees to travel to Tangiers to intervene… which is how Spike’s troubles really begin. This is an economically written thriller that delivers on every level. The third book in the Sanguinetti sequence, Hollow Mountain, is similarly vivid, with almost all of it set on the Rock, while Sleeping Dogs (the fourth) adds a further layer of narrative sophistication.

Almost at the same time that Malcolm Mackay’s The Necessary Death of Lewis Winter created waves in the world of contemporary crime fiction, another novel had an even more sizeable impact. But TERRY HAYES’ I Am Pilgrim is a much more substantial work, weighing in at 700 pages. What is most surprising here is perhaps the utterly individual tone of voice – something all too rare in modern crime fiction. ‘Pilgrim’ is the code name for a man who does not exist. The adopted son of a rich American family, he has been in charge of a clandestine espionage unit and has written a book on forensic science, a book that will help NYPD detective Ben Bradley to find him. A remarkable – and unmissable – novel that deserved its success.

Few crime novels deserve to be called operatic – in the sense of being larger than life, with emotions etched in the most striking of colours – but KT MEDINA’s remarkable debut certainly qualified for the adjective. Painted on the most ambitious of canvases, White Crocodile takes the reader into a Cambodia that suggests the fraught psychological territory of Joseph Conrad’s Africa in Heart of Darkness. In Battambang, not all danger is located in the lethal minefields; young mothers are being abducted. Some are discovered gruesomely mutilated, their abandoned babies by their side. In this superstitious society, people live in fear of the ‘White Crocodile’, a creature that means death for all who encounter it. In England, Tess Hardy has found some equilibrium in her life after severing relations with her abusive husband Luke. Then she receives a call from Cambodia, where Luke is working as a mine-clearer, and Tess realises he has changed. But there is to be no reconciliation; a fortnight later, Luke is dead. Despite her better judgement, Tess sets out for the killing fields to find out what happened to him. Medina has the full measure of the sweltering Cambodian locale, and her own experience in the Territorial Army (as well as working for the information group Jane’s) has been parlayed into her novel with great skill. The descriptions of the minefields of Cambodia – along with those who undertake the terrifying job of finding and disarming mines and IEDs – demonstrate the author’s personal sympathy for this damaged country where thousands of individuals are still maimed and killed by these relics of a bloody war; it might be argued that Medina’s anger is the backbone of the novel, lifting it out of the crime category into something more complex and ambitious. But, in fact, the real skill of White Crocodile lies in its vulnerable but tenacious heroine Tess Hardy, the perfect conduit for the reader through a novel that is unyielding in its grip. The myth of the White Crocodile still exists in Cambodia today, and Medina’s use of this belief as the story engine has allowed her to produce both a strongly written thriller and a passionate meditation on the West’s exploitative attitude to a benighted country. Her second novel, Fire Damage, under the name Kate Medina (and mentored by Mo Hayder), represents a change of pace, with psychologist Jessie Flynn centre stage.

The urbane Atlantic-hopping MICHAEL MARSHALL (who adds a ‘Smith’ – his real name – for his science fiction novels) has firmly established himself as a compelling practitioner of the modern science-based thriller: his elegant prose is always at the service of a supercharged narrative. In Bad Things, somewhat different from his usual fare, a four-year-old boy, Scott Henderson, walks out on to a jetty in Black Ridge, Washington State, and is not seen again. His father, John, is devastated but struggles on – until he receives an e-mail from a stranger who says he knows what happened to the boy. John decides to return to Black Ridge, but instead of a satisfactory solution, chaos is unleashed, and John finds himself likely to lose what little is left to him.

The inclusion of MANDA SCOTT in a book devoted to contemporary British crime writing may seem inappropriate given that she is one of the most talented writers of historical crime fiction in the UK. But her 2015 novel Into the Fire features (along with its period strand) a modern-day narrative, with French copper Inés Picaut looking into arson attacks apparently committed by a self-styled Jihadi group in the city of Orléans. The real achievement of the novel is that the parallel story set in the fifteenth century – with mercenary Tomas Rustbeard planning to kill Joan of Arc – does not suck the oxygen from the modern-day narrative, as period sections are always wont to do in such novels. Both elements are delivered with great vividness, and the book as a whole is proof that Scott’s credentials in the field, both historical and modern, are impeccable.

Crime fiction aficionados are in luck nowadays – barely a month seems to pass without a first-time novelist arriving fully formed, with all the authority of older hands. Such as (for instance) CAL MORIARTY, who centred her 2015 debut The Killing of Bobbi Lomax on an unassuming book-lover who may also be an ingenious murderer. Clark Houseman comes to the attention of Moriarty’s tenacious detectives Sinclair and Alvarez when bombs go off in the US city of Abraham, killing the eponymous Bobbi Lomax and a man named Peter Gudsen. The survivor is Houseman, who turns out to be a skilled forger of literary signatures and, like Lomax and Gudsen, to have belonged to a sinister sect, The Faith. Moriarty’s novel is a blistering examination of both the criminal mind and the dark secrets that lie within America’s fundamentalist Bible Belt.

A body is discovered washed ashore on the beach of a rural Icelandic fishing village. In Frozen Out by multilingual QUENTIN BATES, this is the beginning of a series of events that will pile up problems for the village’s police sergeant Gunnhildur. She is convinced that the death was not an accident – and she begins to investigate the hours leading up to the death. Then a second murder occurs, and Gunnhildur finds herself in a dangerous, and very different, world. The above may suggest an entry from a Nordic crime writer, but Bates is, in fact, English – although he worked in Iceland for his gap year. Bates demonstrates that he has the requisite nous to recognise that an atmospherically realised sense of place is crucial to a novel such as this. Latterly, he has been translating the Icelandic writer Ragnar Jónasson.

The consistency with which BARBARA NADEL has delivered highly atmospheric, sharply characterised novels in her Istanbul-set series of Inspector Cetin Ikmen thrillers is nothing short of amazing – such books as Belshazzar’s Daughter and A Chemical Prison have dovetailed exemplary scene-setting with deliciously tortuous plots, with the resourceful Ikmen always struggling against seemingly intractable cases. Petrified begins during a particularly sultry Istanbul summer, when two bodies are found in a flat: an elderly woman and a young man. But the man died much earlier. And in the Jewish quarter, an artist seems curiously indifferent to the disappearance of his children. There are problems closer to home, too, with a colleague of Ikmen’s having something like a breakdown. Ikmen, as ever, finds unexpected connections between these disparate mysteries, and is soon knee deep in the most curious case of his career, with Russian gangsters adding to the mix. With new facets revealed here in her dogged protagonist, this is Barbara Nadel at her quirky best.

For some time, SAM BOURNE (the alter ego of forthright journalist Jonathan Freedland) has been turning out high-concept thrillers as adroit as anything in the field, if lacking the intellectual rigour of his political writing. In The Chosen One, Maggie Costello is a White House political adviser working for a politician who has inspired her trust. Newly inaugurated president Stephen Baker has won over America, but a potential nemesis has appeared: the sinister Vic Forbes has details of a scandalous secret about the president, with threats of others – and one of those secrets threatens to destroy Baker’s career. Then Forbes is killed and Maggie is forced to reassess her attitude to Baker, the man she so admired – could he be behind a convenient murder?

Wrap up warmly. MJ McGRATH’s Arctic-set outing White Heat may have cheekily borrowed its title from an old James Cagney film, but in every other respect it was a totally original thriller. That book made people sit up and take notice, but inevitably raised expectations for its successor. McGrath managed to match her achievement with The Boy in the Snow, the second book to feature her female Inuit hunter/sleuth Edie Kiglatuk.

Edie is an Arctic guide who knows every inch of the Alaskan forests, but when she is led by a ‘spirit bear’ (a ghostly white creature held in awe by the aboriginals) and discovers the frozen corpse of a child, she little realises the grim consequences the find will have for her. The Anchorage authorities are keen to link the death to a dangerous Russian sect, the Dark Believers – and Edie determines to make herself forget the sight of the boy’s body wrapped in yellow fabric. Her ex-husband, Sammy, has entered an important and challenging dog-sled race, and Edie has agreed to help him. But while Sammy sets out on his journey across hostile territory, Edie is drawn into finding out the truth behind the death of the child. The secrets she uncovers have dark political implications – and Edie’s life is soon in the gravest danger.

As anybody who has read McGrath’s earlier book will know, she is an author with a quietly impressive command of character – Edie is a heroine with whom it is extremely easy to identify, however alien her lifestyle will be to most readers. But the author’s real skill is in the astonishing evocation of the frigid landscape here, along with the sharply conjured details of Inuit life – and in keeping all these elements satisfyingly balanced. The burying of secrets – in both the physical and metaphorical sense – in a snowbound landscape is hardly a new idea, but McGrath makes it feel fresh. With the recent The Bone Seeker, this is turning into a series that readers will want to follow with close attention.

In ROBERT WILSON’s The Ignorance of Blood, Inspector Javier Falcón is caught in a turf war between Russian mafia groups. He has to track down those who set off a bomb that caused a host of deaths, and he encounters a Russian mob connection after a gruesome car crash. But things are complicated when his friend, the Moroccan Yacoub Diori (who works for the Spanish intelligence agency), is blackmailed by the very terrorist group he has infiltrated. This is the last entry in Robert Wilson’s highly regarded Falcón quartet, and it’s hardly surprising that this most reliable of authors has brought his Seville-based sequence to a satisfying conclusion, with the customary impeccable evocation of place.

And speaking of España, one might have thought that Spanish-set crime was territory sewed up by the likes of Robert Wilson, but NICK SWEET has the chutzpah to tackle the genre with The Long Siesta. This concise novel is set in 1998 Seville. An elderly priest has been gruesomely killed, and Nick Sweet’s protagonist Inspector Velazquez quickly finds himself with a slew of trouble involving Russian gangsters (the villains du jour: see Nadel, McGrath et al.) and further ecclesiastical murders. Velazquez proves to be an intriguing and idiosyncratic protagonist, and (despite some infelicitous dialogue) Sweet evokes his sultry locale with vividness.

The first in a trilogy of novels set in the Faroe Islands by BAFTA award-winning script writer and author CHRIS OULD, The Blood Strand has as its principal protagonist the murder squad DI Jan Reyna. Reyna is Faroese by birth but was raised in the UK, and the fact that he is now a stranger to the landscape and culture of the Faroes means that this book is strong on a Scandinavian setting (the Faroes are part of Denmark) seen from a British perspective. Reyna’s clouded past – both from childhood and because he is facing a discipline hearing at home – forms the central spine of the trilogy. He returns to the islands for the first time as an adult because his estranged father is seriously ill, but he’s also come back seeking answers about his mother’s apparent suicide 40 years ago. The book has a distinct flavour of Nordic Noir.

There is an honourable tradition of foreign correspondents turning to the crime and thriller genre – perhaps the most famous being Frederick Forsyth. But those ranks were recently swelled with another impressive addition: ADAM BROOKES, formerly the BBC’s China correspondent, with assignments in Iraq, Afghanistan, North Korea and other countries under his belt. Of course, such experience (and even solid journalistic talent) does not guarantee thriller success, but Brookes displayed a complete mastery of the genre in Night Heron. The plot involves a Chinese spy and a British journalist, with a whole nation hunting them, and we are gripped by the sinewy narrative from the very first page. A desperate prisoner whose name is Peanut escapes from a brutal labour camp at night, braving the freezing desert of north-west China. Twenty years earlier, he worked for British Intelligence, but now must use his skills to vanish into the crowded streets of Beijing – and those streets are covered with surveillance cameras. He contacts his ex-paymasters at MI6 via ambitious journalist Philip Mangan; in return for safe passage out of China, he has a bushel of state secrets he is prepared to trade. Mangan, sensing the scoop of his career, agrees to take part in this highly dangerous adventure, but what neither he nor the escapee realise is just how significant those state secrets really are: the fate of governments is involved, not just the fate of two men on the run.

Like earlier masters of the thriller with a reporting background, Brookes knows exactly how to convey the essence of the situation in the most economic and effective way possible – and local colour is always conveyed with maximum vividness; the reader always knows exactly where they are as the tension begins to mount. More importantly, Brookes turns out to be a writer with a keen grasp of character, and his increasingly out-of-his-depth journalist hero Mangan is a nicely rounded protagonist. The author’s experience of China adds great authority, and his laser-sharp portrayal of the compromised media and oppressive, omnipresent security in that country ensures tremendous authenticity. You may not want to visit Beijing after reading Night Heron, but you will certainly want to read more thrillers by Adam Brookes.

Admirers often make extravagant claims for their favourite authors, but discerning readers can safely say that the best thriller writer currently working in the UK is GERALD SEYMOUR. He is, quite simply, the most intelligent and accomplished thriller practitioner around, and even his misfires (of which there are few) are more interesting than most of the competition. His influential debut novel Harry’s Game celebrated its fortieth anniversary in 2015. There is a lengthy list of fine Seymour novels, but let’s look at The Collaborator. The Borellis are an institution in Naples – they are part of the vicious Camorra, and their discipline and retribution for transgressions are swift, even if the transgressor is one of the family. When so many novelists in the field are happy with shop-worn plots, Seymour always manages to create fresh and original protagonists, and weaves for them situations that are unlike anything he has come up with before. The Collaborator is Seymour firing on all cylinders, and his rivals can simply step aside: this writer, as so often, wipes the floor with everyone else.

Those lucky enough to have picked up MARTIN O’BRIEN’s debut crime novel, Jacquot and the Waterman, will have discovered a wonderfully inventive and involving detective story, with vivid French locales creating the perfect backdrop. O’Brien, who lives in Gloucestershire, was travel editor of Vogue, and it’s hardly surprising that he utilised his globetrotting to produce his first crime novel. He continued the sequence about Daniel Jacquot of the Regional Crime Squad with Jacquot and the Angel. In this second book, Jacquot is unhappy with the work of his colleagues after a well-to-do German family living in Provence is murdered. It’s a particularly grisly killing, involving a shotgun discharged over and over again at point-blank range. A gardener from the region is the chief suspect, but Jacquot isn’t convinced. As Jacquot struggles with intractable facts, an enigmatic young woman appears and claims to have crucial knowledge that might crack the case. The answer to the mystery lies some 50 years in the past, when the Gestapo murdered a group of resistance fighters, and stirred into the mix are blackmail, lust and prejudice – and even Jacquot’s own family.

It takes only a couple of pages before it’s perfectly clear that O’Brien is no one-trick pony and that this second outing for the dogged Jacquot is quite as involving and forceful as the first. While the plotting takes the reader on a satisfyingly tortuous course, once again it’s the meticulous scene-setting that really pays off here: French country life has never been so fraught with sinister atmosphere, and the beauty of the locales is shot through with the heavy legacy of the past.

The personable ANNE ZOUROUDI’s The Doctor of Thessaly is a typically dramatic, richly evocative piece with a tangible sense of place. The setting is a sweltering Greek island, awash with intrigue and deception. A doctor is attacked in a churchyard, a victim of a crime doesn’t want it to be solved, a government dignitary is paying a visit – and corpulent Greek detective Hermes Diaktoros is called upon to utilise his highly unusual ratiocination skills to pull together the threads of a very confusing tapestry. His tasks involve not just the standard fare for a detective but the sorting out of fractured relationships. The Doctor of Thessaly is customarily diverting fare from the reliable Zouroudi, whose own personal life played out like a real-life version of the film Shirley Valentine, experience she has put to fruitful use.

MARNIE RICHES, whose eye-opening debut The Girl Who Wouldn’t Die is set in Amsterdam and London, provides further proof that we are in something of a golden age for exciting new crime writing. Riches has created a wonderfully idiosyncratic heroine in George (real name Georgina) McKenzie, prone to bad judgement, and places her in an artfully constructed novel that even incorporates cogent discussions of sexuality and gender. Marnie Riches is clearly a name to watch.

There are various writers who are granted the accolade ‘master storyteller’ by their publishers (usually in the teeth of the truth), but one British writer unquestionably has earned (and continues to earn) such a title – the prolific and inventive ROBERT GODDARD. His novel Fault Line was advertised as a classic British mystery from the master of the triple-cross, with the intricacy of his plotting applauded – and it’s hard to argue with this assessment. But what is perhaps most impressive about this assemblage of skills is the sheer consistency that the novelist has demonstrated over the years. The ever-reliable Goddard remains one of the most imaginative novelists this country has produced – a specialist in forging narratives of complete command and power. His name on the jacket is a sure-fire guarantee that the book will be very hard to put down – as with such books as Blood Count, which has the conflicted surgeon Edward Hammond as a strongly drawn protagonist caught up in a pursuit for answers that takes him across Europe.

The vivid Blood Loss is one of Irish author ALEX BARCLAY’s most accomplished US-set books and exerts a grip throughout its nicely-judged length. FBI agent Ren Bryce is drawn into her most challenging case when a father’s work puts his daughter at considerable risk. But this is only the starting point for a complex and intriguing novel in which the things that people hide from others become the source of the most dangerous threats. What works particularly well here is the careful and adept parcelling out of information, so that the reader is always hungry for more – and always turning just one more page before switching out the bedside lamp.

When you enjoy the title ‘King of the Erotic Thriller’ (as veteran writer, editor and publisher MAXIM JAKUBOWSKI does), you have a certain reputation to live up to. Such books as I Was Waiting For You demonstrated that Jakubowski could lay an inarguable claim to that title with the kind of confrontational writing that marked out such earlier books as Confessions of a Romantic Pornographer, and which had Ken Bruen comparing Jakubowski to both Anaïs Nin and Raymond Chandler. In I Was Waiting For You, a young Italian woman is forced to leave her home in Rome and begins a very unsuitable relationship with a man in Paris. At the same time, ruthless assassin (and stripper) Cornelia – one of Jakubowski’s signature characters – has been handed another mission. The two women’s paths are sure to cross, and in the middle will be an English crime writer-cum-private eye on the lookout for a missing person. With the customary bouts of unbuttoned sex, Jakubowski takes the reader on an eye-opening trip from America to France, taking in Venice and Barcelona, before ending up with a dramatic finale. Unsparing stuff – and not to everyone’s taste, of course, but it’s pure Jakubowski.

NEIL GRIFFITHS’ detective Daniel Wright is used to dealing with dangerous people in his Calabrian jurisdiction. In the diverting Saving Caravaggio, Wright is tracking down the artist’s Nativity (famously stolen in real life in the 1960s and still unrecovered); he vows to claim it back from the Mafia. But in order to do this, Daniel has to disobey the orders of his superiors and even put his marriage on the line. Forming an association with gallery curator Francesca Natali, he finds that his attempt to recover the stolen art puts him right at the top of the Mafia hit list. What makes this one function so well is the atmospherically drawn locale. Certainly, Daniel Wright is a solid hero, but it’s the sultry heat of Calabria that makes this such a persuasive read.

Before assuming his new writing name – JACK GRIMWOOD – certain themes defined the fiction of the cosmopolitan Jon Courtenay Grimwood: a clash between cultures, fragmented families, the corrosive impact of memory, a hero on the edge of power without having power himself. And, perhaps most important of all, the potential for redemption. A strong sense of place runs through all the novels, showing most strongly in the Ashraf Bey mysteries, where the city of El Iskandryia almost becomes a character in its own right. This, combined with the tightness of the writing and Grimwood’s refusal to avoid difficult themes, resulted in his solid critical reputation. With Pashazade, his first novel set in El Iskandryia and featuring his half-Berber, half-American detective, Grimwood began to write novels that are crime fiction first, and everything else afterwards. Two other Ashraf Bey novels followed (Effendi and Felaheen), which are also set in a twenty-first century where the Ottoman Empire still exists. 9tail Fox is Grimwood’s most traditional crime novel, while End of the World Blues is a crime-cum-Murakamiesque SF novel featuring a British sniper on the run and managing an Irish bar in Tokyo (it won the BSFA Award for best novel, as did Felaheen). But with a new publisher and a slightly finessed name, Grimwood has inaugurated a new chapter of his writing career with a series of thrillers featuring Tom Fox, a disgraced major from Army Intelligence. The first book, Moskva, is set (obviously enough) in Moscow, and mixes flashbacks to the fall of Berlin in 1945 with a hunt for the missing daughter of the British ambassador and political strife in the Politburo during the run-up to the fall of the Soviet Union.

LISA APPIGNANESI is well known for her espousal of literary freedoms throughout the world. As a novelist, in such books as The Memory Man her examination of human psychology has a forensic intensity, but her most astringent work is found in her dark psychological thrillers that redefine the parameters of genre fiction. In the powerfully written The Dead of Winter, a savage killer has murdered 14 women students in Montreal, and the actress Madeleine Blais is consumed by a fear that someone is determined to murder her too.

CHRIS HASLAM, one of the quirkiest talents in British crime writing, cites a childhood spent in rural isolation with no TV as the probable cause of his twin desires to write and to see the world. His unusual occupations included pipe laying in Africa, working as a scrap metal broker in Laos, selling bibles in Sicily, teaching weapon handling in Alabama and volunteering in El Salvador. His first novel, Twelve Step Fandango, was a jet-black literary crime thriller set among the drug dealers of Spain’s Costa del Sol. The book introduced Haslam’s comic antihero Martin Brock and was shortlisted for the Edgar Allan Poe Award.

Brock reappeared in Alligator Strip, Haslam’s second book, a tale of grifters working the coin fairs of Florida on a ‘sure-fire’ plan to scam $6 million in six months. It earned Haslam the accolade of being the nearest thing Britain has to Carl Hiaasen. El Sid, published in 2006, marked a departure from the first-person picaresque of the Brock adventures and a return to Spain, the land Haslam clearly loves best. Seamlessly switching between the 1930s and the present day, El Sid chronicles a tragi-comic quixotic quest by an aged veteran of the Spanish Civil War and his two ne’er-do-well sidekicks for seven tons of Republican gold stolen and lost in 1938. El Sid was chosen by the Independent as its Crime Book of the Year for 2006.

If you hanker after strong, pungent writing, then the fierce work of SIMON BECKETT is for you. In Whispers of the Dead, forensic expert David Hunter has escaped the grim residue of his last case and has returned to the research faculty at which he learned his craft: the Body Farm in Tennessee. He accepts an invitation from his ex-mentor to visit a crime scene – a secluded cabin. The horrors that await him there take him swiftly back into the territory he knows too well: a cat-and-mouse game with a cunning and monstrous killer. Beckett’s fans will know what to expect from his work – and, although the squeamish would be wise to steer clear, the rest of us will have a grimly suspenseful and edgy time. The Chemistry of Death, Written in Bone and the more recent Stone Bruises are equally impressive, with Beckett demonstrating a casual mastery of adroitly orchestrated tension.

The urbane PAUL MENDELSON’s expertise in the poker field is enshrined in several bestselling books on the subject, and he has clearly been salting away the forensic examination of human behaviour acquired in that discipline. His debut novel, The First Rule of Survival, bristled with a command of language and narrative that suggests someone with a slew of novels under their belt; the South African setting is also impressively realised. A decade ago in Cape Town, three white schoolboys were abducted, their disappearance a mystery that has not been solved. Colonel Vaughn de Vries finds a cold case getting hot when the corpses of two white teenagers are found. The troubled policeman becomes obsessed with bringing a vicious criminal (or criminals) to justice. Mendelson demonstrates a sense of locale to rival even such old hands as Deon Meyer (and, like Meyer, he introduces racism as a key element in the story). Some will have trouble with the utterly uncompromising directions in which Mendelson takes his narrative, but most will find this to be authoritative and unblinkered fare.

Given his thorough knowledge of Hong Kong and Thailand, it’s hardly surprisingly that the writer JOHN BURDETT evokes his locales with maximum skill in such impressive novels as Bangkok 8 and its sequels, from Bangkok Tattoo to Vulture Peak. At one time, Burdett was an employee of the Hong Kong government, and later worked in private legal practice, though he has claimed that he never really wanted to be a lawyer – such is the richness and energy of these novels, readers can be grateful for the fact that he abandoned his earlier career. A key novel is The Last Six Million Seconds, set in Hong Kong in April and May 1997, prior to the British handover of the territory to mainland China, and focusing on a gruesome murder investigation that begins with three severed heads found floating on the maritime border between Hong Kong territory and China.

Word of mouth on the pseudonymous writer PARKER BILAL began to circulate among critics – and subsequently the reading public – shortly after his first novel, Navigation of a Rainmaker, began to glean enthusiastic reviews. That book was written under his real name of Jamal Mahjoub, and over two decades passed (with several intervening novels) before ‘Parker Bilal’ was born. The first book under this new moniker, The Golden Scales, featured a Sudanese private detective living in Cairo, but it was his second, Dogstar Rising, that was the breakthrough. It reveals colourful, atmospheric writing, with much of the author’s literary antecedents informing the elegant use of language.

It’s always satisfying to be able to give oneself a pat on the back, and those readers who caught on to the solid thrillers of the protean MICHAEL RIDPATH right from the start have every right to be self-congratulatory. From his earliest financial thrillers to his recent entries in the Scandicrime genre, Ridpath has shown himself to be a talented stylist of real élan, and (despite the occasional misstep) his books have got better and better. The Predator is one of the best, engaging the reader in the lean prose of the novel’s first part, and gripping even more in the considerably longer part two. This is the duplicitous world of top investment banks; at Bloomfield Weiss, the highly paid employees are rigorously instructed in the vicious art of being killer deal-makers. During a punishing training programme in New York, Ridpath’s protagonists Chris and Lenka have learned their lethal skills and have established a powerful bond. But during a drunken boat trip, one of the trainees dies, and the rest conceal the truth about what happened. Ten years pass, and Chris finds himself watching Lenka’s blood spill on to a snowy Prague street after a brutal attack. Struggling to keep his own company afloat, he realises that tracking down Lenka’s murderer may be the only means of saving his own life. Admittedly, the canny reader will quickly work out that the tragic death in the past is the clue to the mayhem that ensues, but that hardly matters when Ridpath knows just how to keep us enthralled.

Where the Shadows Lie represented a new direction for the talented Ridpath. With considerable nerve, he has taken on the army of Nordic writers at their own game and set his kinetic thriller among the striking volcanic landscapes of Iceland, with an ancient manuscript at the centre of the labyrinthine plot. Apart from the impressive scene-setting, Ridpath makes a mark with his detective: Iceland-born, Boston-raised homicide cop Magnus Jonson. Ridpath gives his Scandinavian rivals a run for their money in this and the follow-up titles in the series, including 2016’s impressive Sea of Stone.

London-born MARGIE ORFORD grew up in Namibia and South Africa and began writing while at Cape Town University. During the 1985 State of Emergency, she was detained – and did some of her writing in prison. This is a long and honourable tradition (Dostoevsky, de Sade), and Orford has transmuted her political experiences into pithy crime novels; Blood Rose is one of the best. She has talked about sitting in a bar in Cape Town, with the beauty of Table Mountain and the endless blue sky undercut by the feral street children lurking outside, as ready to pull a knife as to beg. For Orford, though, it is the misogynistic treatment of women – endemic in South Africa – that is one of the engines of her fiction. She noted that crime in the country is sexualised, with the highest rate of rape in the world. As an investigative journalist, she studied everything from gang initiation to the survivors of crime, struggling to find the congruence between the beauty of the country and its moral dislocation.

However, such books as Blood Rose are not given over to impassioned ideological arguments – Orford is canny enough to know that her principal duty is to engage the reader. This second outing in her Clare Hart series once again features her sharp and streetwise investigative journalist with a PhD in femicide and sexual murder. Clare has an on/off relationship with a good-looking captain in the South African police, Riedwaan Faizal, who uses her as a profiler on difficult cases. Admittedly, the setup here is something of a switched-gender variant on Val McDermid’s DCI Carol Jordan and Dr Tony Hill, but Orford’s characters enjoy a slightly more fulfilling sex life. In Blood Rose, Clare is looking into the gruesome killing of a homeless young boy. The evidence suggests that a serial killer is at work in the blighted township of Walvis Bay, but to track down this monster, Clare must enter the lives of these desperate, disadvantaged teenagers whose deaths are of no interest to the more privileged members of South African society. Rather like the Australian novels of Peter Temple, there is a highly satisfying marriage here between a keen desire for the betterment of society and the no-nonsense imperatives of the best crime fiction. It’s an edgy union that Margie Orford presides over with great dexterity.

CHRISTOBEL KENT’s intuitive Italian sleuth Sandro Cellini has proved to be one of the most distinctive coppers on the crime scene, and readers may feel that the sweltering heat of Florence offers a refreshing change from the British drizzle. In The Dead Season, the unrelenting August sun is beating down on the streets of Florence, leaving them deserted as the inhabitants escape to the cooler countryside and coast. Sandro Cellini, now working as a private detective (his days on the force behind him), is – to his frustration – unable to join the mass getaway to where the cool sea breezes beckon, as he has a case. He has been hired by a heavily pregnant young woman concerned about the disappearance of her fiancé. And there are other things disturbing the peace of the empty city: the distended body of a bank manager has been discovered in the grass on a roundabout, initially thought to be the victim of a hit-and-run driver. And a bank teller, Roxana Delfino, is worried by the wavering mental faculties of her elderly mother – and has also noted the disappearance of a regular client of the bank. Sandro finds that his investigations open up the proverbial can of worms, and even though he is aided by a helpful team – his assistant Giuli, his wife Luisa and his ex-partner Pietro from his police days – he soon begins to believe that he is out of his depth.

Earlier Cellini novels by Kent (notably A Time of Mourning and A Fine and Private Place) marked the series out as one of the most individual and enjoyable in the field, with the engaging Sandro, struggling to come to terms with a tragedy in his past, a truly winning protagonist. He is also the perfect conduit through this vividly realised Italian city – and Kent’s evocative descriptions of Florence provide much of the pleasure here. There is never a sense that the settings and locales are simply there because they had to be – Kent makes the ancient city a major player in the narrative. The Dead Season, however, might best be read with a cool drink and a gentle fan playing on the reader’s face. It is a book that raises the temperature.

Crime aficionados have particular cause to be grateful to the talented PAUL JOHNSTON: apart from the much-acclaimed Quintin Dalrymple, Scottish-set novels, Johnston has created another, equally distinctive series. The Alex Mavros books are set in Greece (where the author now lives), and this half-Greek, half-Scots private eye is a memorable creation: resourceful, quixotic and sympathetic. Crying Blue Murder was a powerful outing for Mavros, and The Golden Silence was, if anything, even better. This time, Alex is assigned to track down a missing teenager. As he conducts his search, he is aware of a host of savage deaths in Athens. Then Alex begins to notice connections, and, as he enters a dangerous criminal underworld, the remnants of the civil war begin to figure in a lethal scenario. Mavros is a more straightforward character than the eccentric Dalrymple, but this series displays some of Paul Johnston’s most trenchant writing.

The loss of the dyspeptic, stylish crime novelist Michael Dibdin and his Italian-set thrillers, shoehorning that beautiful country’s endemic corruption into persuasive crime narratives, was much mourned by readers. Dibdin’s publisher, Faber, put their money on TOBIAS JONES to fill the immense gap he had left, after Jones’s lacerating non-fiction exposé The Dark Heart of Italy set out his stall as anatomist of what was then Signor Berlusconi’s compromised nation. Jones’s strategy in The Salati Case is to drop a very Chandleresque private eye into an unnamed Italian town (though readers may pick up on the location through references to the local ham) and weave a labyrinthine plot for the detective, Castagnetti, to tackle. There’s a secondary debt here to another, less heralded giant of the American private eye novel, Ross Macdonald: Castagnetti is hired by a lawyer working for a dead widow’s estate to establish whether her missing son is still alive in order to settle her legacy (those who know Macdonald’s The Galton Case may spot a certain homage here – and note the two titles). The son, Riccardo, had a host of enemies: he was a chronic gambler who owed money to unforgiving creditors – and Castagnetti’s probings are further complicated by the suspicious death of Riccardo’s older brother.

So… does Faber have Michael Dibdin Mark II on their books? Yes and no. As might be expected, Tobias Jones is trenchant on the detail of Italianate double-dealing, and his conjuring of the Mediterranean locales is always immensely evocative. But Dibdin’s copper, Zen, was a formidably characterised protagonist, right from the first book, and Jones has opted for a more generic private eye, with all the sardonic observations we’re more used to in LA-set narratives than on the sun-baked strade of Italy. Jones may, of course, have been husbanding his resources by keeping Castagnetti low key, with a view to broadening him out in subsequent books – which has, in fact, been the case.

It is a particular pleasure to know that the books of DANIEL PEMBREY’s Harbour Master sequence proved, beyond argument, that Amsterdam Noir is in safe hands with this capable writer. The books begin when maverick detective Henk van der Pol discovers the body of a woman in Amsterdam’s harbour. But his investigation is complicated when a sadistic pimp targets the detective’s family. The three books in the series – The Harbour Master, The Maze and Ransom – are all equally accomplished, sporting a vividly realised sense of locale matched by an adroit evocation of character. Holland has produced such crime writers as Charles den Tex, yet remains far less prolific in terms of noir than Britain or neighbouring Scandinavia. This is tantalising, given how well suited the country is: it is a liberal society, it has the settings, notably the great port cities of Amsterdam and Rotterdam, and there is an engaging humour and stoicism found in its people. And now British noir authors are pitching in, creating an interesting relationship between these two countries. Pembrey lived in Amsterdam’s docklands for a year to create his police character van der Pol, aka the eponymous Harbour Master: a maverick, if not exactly damaged, cop, who fights authority while trying to crack cases that involve murder, drugs, fine-art theft and a high-profile kidnapping. Pembrey’s violence reaches industrial levels when need be, yet The Harbour Master also looks penetratingly at issues including the Netherlands’ colonial past and the country’s trading and political position in the world. In that regard, Pembrey has found an unusual depth of vision with which to examine his British homeland, which shares the maritime history and uneasy relationship between traditions and modern-day problems (everything from immigration to anxieties over waning influence overseas). Nooitgedacht, as they say.

Readers’ tastes for densely packed, fast-moving political thrillers remain as keen as ever, and it was good to welcome PETER MURPHY to the ranks of the best practitioners in the field in 2012 with the weighty Removal. The American president, Steve Wade, is sure that he has kept his relations with a seductive Lebanese woman clandestine, but then she is killed, and FBI operative Kelly Smith is assigned to investigate the death. What comes to light is a series of sinister connections between fanatical white supremacists and dangerous enemies abroad. Apart from the skilful mechanics of the thriller plotting, one of the pleasures here is the plausible laying out of the machinations of the American government. The writer Clem Chambers, enlisted for an endorsement, evokes the superb political thriller Seven Days in May as a yardstick here, and, to his credit, Murphy is able to justify that daunting comparison.

The bestseller principle that any thriller must be treated as a series of tenuously connected action set pieces with merely decorative interruptions is something that clearly doesn’t appeal to STEPHEN LEATHER, as The Eyewitness comprehensively proves. He’s similarly impatient with the idea that characterisation must be forced into a well-worn groove, and this book is quite as innovative in this area as it is in its plotting. As in such books as Birthday Girl and The Long Shot, the action grows organically out of the narrative, and the overriding motif here is plausibility. Toiling in the shattered country that is Yugoslavia, Jack Solomon’s job is to give an identity to the victims of ethnic cleansing and to inform the grieving relatives. This ex-copper has found a way of keeping the horrors at bay, but when a truck crammed full of corpses is recovered from a lake, Jack finds his grim imperturbability shaken. The only survivor of the massacre is a young girl, and as Jack tracks her down, the killers are similarly close on her trail. And the reasons for the mass killings lie not just in this war-torn country but far away in the wealthy capital of England, with prostitution (organised via the internet) a key element in the equation.

GRAEME MACRAE BURNET’s novels share a dark, fatalistic sensibility, but very different locales (at the time of writing this survey, he had published two – the second historical and set in Scotland). His debut novel, The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau, takes place in the unremarkable small town of Saint-Louis in France and tells the story of the involvement of a local maladroit, Manfred Baumann, in the investigation of the disappearance of a waitress. It is steeped in the ambience of French provincial life, with strong echoes of Simenon, and, like the Belgian master, delves deep into the psychology of its characters.

‘The Kyrgyz winter reminds us that the past is never dead, simply waiting to ambush us around the next corner.’ TOM CALLAGHAN’s protagonist in A Killing Winter, Inspector Akyl Borubaev of the Bishkek Murder Squad, arrives at the brutal murder scene of a young woman; all evidence hints at a sadistic serial killer on the hunt for more prey. But when the young woman’s father turns out to be a leading government minister, the pressure is on Borubaev to solve the case not only quickly but also quietly, by any means possible. Still in mourning after his wife’s recent death, Borubaev descends into Bishkek’s brutal underworld, a place where no one and nothing is as it seems, where everyone is playing for the highest stakes, and where violence is the only solution. Tom Callaghan, born in the north of England, utilises his experiences as an inveterate traveller (he divides his time between London, Prague, Dubai and Bishkek) in the atmospheric settings employed here.

The high-concept crime/thriller novel is clearly in rude health, as The First Horseman from the ebullient CLEM CHAMBERS proves. Well-heeled trader Jim Evans has only the best interests of the planet at heart, and is keen to fund research that will ameliorate people’s lives. At the same time, Professor Christopher Cardini has been working on cutting-edge medical advances involving cell therapy – he will be able, he claims, to rejuvenate the dying. But if Cardini sounds like somebody who should be on Jim Evans’ Christmas card list, that is most definitely not the case. The First Horseman, the fourth book in Chambers’ series featuring the sympathetic trader Jim Evans, ends up in a titanic struggle between nothing less than good and evil. If the basic premise here might seem to owe something to the late Michael Crichton (or even Robin Cook – not the late British politician – who similarly worked in the field of high-concept medical thrillers), this is none the worse for that; the writing, while functional and lacking finesse, has the kind of energy that we expect from Chambers. The writer’s ability lies not only in making a super-rich trader sympathetic (no easy task), but in marrying solid storytelling to persuasive scientific facts.

LEE CHILD has inexorably built up one of the most devoted and enthusiastic followings of any current thriller writer – and it’s not hard to see why. Since his first appearances in Killing Floor and Die Trying, Jack Reacher has become one of the most enduring of contemporary heroes, and his laconic, hard-boiled appeal is easy to fathom. But perhaps it’s the effortless American locales that really set the seal – particularly impressive in light of the fact that the author is English. The Enemy received the usual plaudits; this outing for Jack Reacher is Lee Child at his considerable best. Set before the other books, this one has Reacher finding himself in North Carolina on New Year’s Day, 1990. In other parts of the world, history is being made – the Berlin Wall is being torn down. But Reacher, still a military policeman, is dealing with a baffling case: a soldier has been found lifeless in a downmarket motel, and when Jack visits the house of the soldier (a general, in fact) to break the news to the dead man’s wife, he finds that she is also dead. Soon, dark happenings on another part of the globe are setting off ripples in the States, and Reacher is up against the hardest – and most dangerous – task he has yet encountered. As a picture of the early life of Jack Reacher, this has all the energy and drive of Child’s best work.

How easy is it to fool Americans? Two Brits have done pretty well at pulling the wool over US readers’ eyes and have enjoyed massive success in the States as (so Americans believe) home-grown crime authors, despite being from England and Ireland respectively. But both Englishman Lee Child (discussed above) and Irishman JOHN CONNOLLY have so thoroughly mastered the American idiom that their success was assured in a country that grows ever more resistant to all things foreign.

With John Connolly, however, it’s not just the totally authentic American voice that impresses, but his jaw-dropping ambition: his novel The Black Angel, for instance, is not just a galvanic thriller, it’s also a surprisingly sophisticated meditation on religion and the supernatural (although, it has to be said, some people are going to find the latter a little hard to take). Connolly, who was born in Dublin, made waves with his first thriller, Every Dead Thing, which inaugurated his risky games with the genres in which he worked. Was this a crime novel? Horror? As the modern thriller (since Thomas Harris) has become more and more gruesome, such distinctions are a little academic these days, but Connolly has virtually no match when it comes to chilling his readers. The White Road was a remarkable synthesis of Stephen King and Raymond Chandler, with Connolly’s dogged sleuth Charlie ‘Bird’ Parker (named after the alto saxophonist) encountering evil that terrifyingly shaded into the supernatural.

In The Black Angel, somebody is collecting bodies and fashioning bizarre sculptures from the bones. Charlie Parker’s associate Louis has been tracking down his missing cousin, and when her skull is found in the possession of a macabre artisan, Charlie finds himself caught up in a sinister maelstrom of which the bone sculpture is only one element. Aeons ago, fragments of a vellum map were distributed among various Cistercian monasteries, and these fragments are the key to the whereabouts of the sinister Black Angel, sealed in a silver statue. If the fragments are united, great evil will be unleashed upon the world. This is heady stuff, dispatched with all the casual brio that is John Connolly’s stock in trade. In order to make us swallow the outrageous central premise, we are carefully lulled into the gritty reality of Charlie Parker’s world, with its brutal pimps and bail jumpers. But while Charlie is adept at moving in this murky underworld, there are hints that there is much more to him than just a tough and resourceful catcher of thieves. Some may wish that Connolly had not plunged so deeply into the supernatural here, but those willing to take the journey will find that the rewards are considerable.

COLIN COTTERILL gleaned a slew of impressive reviews for his novel The Coroner’s Lunch, a book that was that rara avis, something entirely new in the crime fiction field. His central character, the elderly coroner Dr Siri Paiboun, was something we hadn’t seen before: in his seventies, but still sharp and lively, struggling with his career in the 1970s as the only coroner in Laos, a country that thrives on dishonesty and corruption. The Coroner’s Lunch won the author many readers, with enthusiastic comparisons being made to the novels of Alexander McCall Smith – usually in Cotterill’s favour, as his narratives sport a much darker hue than the less threatening world of McCall Smith. Paiboun reappeared in the equally entertaining Disco for the Departed, which was the third outing for this unusual crime protagonist. Siri is obliged to travel to the mountains of Huaphan Province – the region where the totalitarian communist rulers of the country hid from the authorities before their own accession to power. But as festivities begin for the ‘success’ of the new regime (which, of course, is beyond criticism), a human arm is discovered sticking out of a concrete walkway that has been laid from the president’s cave hideout to his splendid new home under the cliffs. Siri is handed the job of uncovering the arm, and the body to which it is attached, and identifying the corpse. His autopsy reveals that the body was buried alive, but in order to track down the killer, the elderly pathologist has to call on some of his supernatural skill (admirers may have an ambiguous attitude towards this element of the books). What Cotterill’s doughty hero uncovers is a complex web of mysteries, and he has to tackle both government indifference and brutal killers. It’s hard to believe that even a more ‘literary’ book could conjure up the country of Laos – in all its beauty and corruption – as vividly as Cotterill manages here.

The choice of his A Quiet Belief in Angels for a TV book club selection shifted thousands of copies in the UK, and somehow RJ ELLORY, despite being highly prolific, has largely maintained the momentum of that book with a series of novels that almost always enjoy more than respectable sales, if not the massive success of the earlier book. What’s more, these are never slim novellas, but bulky, arm-straining epics – Ellory is clearly not interested in making things easy for himself. Like Lee Child, Ellory is an Englishman who chooses to set his novels in the States; both men pride themselves on getting all the US detail correct, but there the resemblance ends. While Lee Child chronicles the bone-crushing exploits of his series hero Jack Reacher, all of Ellory’s books are standalones – introducing us to a whole new set of characters and conflicts each time. And it is to his credit that he always succeeds in rigidly maintaining our attention throughout his vast, sprawling narratives.

In A Dark and Broken Heart, Vincent Madigan is deeply in debt to heavyweight Harlem drug dealer Sandia (whose nickname is ‘The Watermelon Man’) and is desperate to find a way out. An opportunity seems to arise: he will steal $400,000 from a group of thieves who, of course, will not be able to call the police. The charming, self-possessed Madigan sees this risky heist as a way of reclaiming his life – but, needless to say, things begin to go sour very quickly. Madigan is obliged to murder his co-conspirators in the theft, and he then discovers that the stolen money is marked. What’s more, a child has been shot during the robbery and an extremely motivated New York police force is on his tail – not to mention the murderous Sandia. And there is another problem – Madigan’s own conscience, which is proving to be as painful as any external threat. Thankfully, few of us will have tackled the problems that Madigan faces, but such is Ellory’s skill that we are forced to identify with this deeply compromised antihero. As ever, the writing is pungent and lacerating – this is a book that takes no prisoners.

In MATT HILTON’s Dead Men’s Dust, Joe Hunter uses his military training to take on unpleasant types – and he’s not too fussy about his methods. He’s on the trail of his brother John, from whom he has grown apart; John has vanished, and it’s clear that something bad has happened. Little Rock, Arkansas is to be Joe’s destination – but another man is on a collision course with him. The Harvestman is an implacable serial killer, with a penchant for collecting – or harvesting – gruesome souvenirs from his victims. When the two meet, it won’t be pretty. Writers such as Simon Kernick lined up to acclaim this debut thriller, which inaugurated a healthy career for Hilton.

In New York, David Trevellyan comes across a corpse in an alley – and is arrested. He has been set up. But Trevellyan works for Royal Naval Intelligence, and both he and the dead man were on a clandestine assignment in the city involving a highly dangerous woman. Even is the inaugural book in ANDREW GRANT’s series featuring Lieutenant Commander David Trevellyan, and it is a strong entry that marries high-octane action and well-delineated character. Grant’s brother is top thriller writer Lee Child; so far, Grant is still very much in Child’s shadow, with no sign (as yet) of that situation changing – possibly to Grant’s chagrin.

How easy is it for a novelist – of the literary or the crime variety – to address religion in a provocative fashion? Salman Rushdie found to his cost that there is little room for nuance in any literary discussion of Islam, but it was unlikely that PHILIP KERR’s Prayer would raise many hackles, despite the fact that it engaged with issues involving Christian belief in a far more incendiary fashion than Rushdie ever did with Islam. Two things divided Kerr admirers: firstly, there is the fact that this was the author’s first standalone novel in a decade (with his Nazi-era sleuth Bernie Gunther hors de combat – and not discussed in this study because of the period settings); and, secondly, for a book written by an atheist, Prayer has one of the most thoroughgoing discussions of religion and belief that one is likely to encounter in contemporary writing.

The protagonist is special agent Gil Martins, whose job is to investigate domestic terrorism for the Houston FBI. His once unshakeable Christian faith has been under severe strain, and he is on the point of abandoning it – principally because his job forces him to confront the bloodshed that a supposedly benign deity permits on a daily basis. His moral conflict, however, lies closer to home. He has bitter arguments with his wife Ruth, whose piety contrasts with his doubt. With his marriage disintegrating, Gil investigates a sequence of unexplained deaths that prove to have a pointed relevance to his own crisis of faith. A mentally disturbed woman informs him that the victims have all been killed by prayer. Evidence accrues that there are powerful figures on the Religious Right who may be involved with the death of prominent atheists (were Richard Dawkins American, he would surely be on the list), and Gil may have to accept that he is up against a supernatural force. It was inevitable that some would lament the author’s move away from the Second World War era, but Prayer is a high-concept novel tackled in unabashed fashion. When Graham Greene mentioned to his co-religionist Evelyn Waugh that his faith was faltering and he was no longer comfortable being called a Catholic novelist, the more devout Waugh quickly applied a three-line whip to push him back into line. Philip Kerr, thankfully, could address issues of faith and atheism without any fear of negative influence – unless the bean counters at his publishers have persuaded him to get back to the more commercial territory of his Bernie Gunther thrillers.

In Hull resident DAVID YOUNG’s 1970s-set and much-acclaimed debut Stasi Child, we encounter East German detective Oberleutnant Karin Müller, investigating the discovery of the body of a teenage girl near the Berlin Wall. Müller is employed by the state police but believes the killing has the fingerprints of the Stasi, while the feared secret police are blaming the West. Echoes here of Tom Rob Smith and Philip Kerr, but Young, a graduate of City University’s MA in crime writing, has a notably individual voice.

A considerable head of steam quickly built up for The Samaritan by MASON CROSS, a sprawling American epic delivered with panache by the Glasgow-born author. As with such writers as John Connolly, The Samaritan once again demonstrates that Celtic authors have the measure of crime fiction US-style and its broad canvas.

Other writers and key books

STEVE CAVANAGH: The Defence (USA)

TOM FOX: Dominus (Italy)

ARLENE HUNT: The Chosen (USA)

SUSANNA JONES: The Earthquake Bird (Japan)

TOBY VINTCENT: Driven (International)

TIMOTHY WILLIAMS: Converging Parallels (Italy)

TOM WOOD: The Darkest Day (USA)