Andrew Taylor

Mo Hayder has a considerable and well-deserved reputation as a writer of horrific crime novels that often revolve around the physical violence men do to women. Her latest, Hanging Hill (Bantam, £18.99), is no exception. Set in Bath, it’s the story of two estranged sisters — Zoe, a detective inspector equipped with a motorbike and a welter of scars, both physical and emotional; and Sally, the divorced mother of a teenage girl, who is struggling to cope with her vertiginous plunge from the agreeable plateau inhabited by Bath’s affluent middle classes. The narrative moves alternately between the sisters’ lives and the impact that the murder of a beautiful teenage girl has upon them.

Andrew Rosenheim is building a solid reputation for intelligent, thoughtful thrillers driven by character and theme rather than plot mechanics. His latest, Fear Itself (Hutchinson, £14.99), breaks new ground for him in that it is also a historical novel. Set mainly in the United States in the late 1930s and the first year of the second world war, it deals with the activities of the Bund, an outwardly respectable German-American organisation with a pro-Nazi agenda. Jimmy Nessheim, a young Special Agent in the recently established FBI, is given the job of infiltrating it. The stakes are high — President Roosevelt is trying to obstruct Hitler’s increasingly ruthless advance in Europe, and the Bund’s priority is to obstruct Roosevelt.

Here is the latest Book End column from this week's issue of the Spectator: Much of Stephen King’s recent work has been relatively lighthearted, but in Full Dark, No Stars he returns with gusto to his dark side and explores the perils of getting what you ask for. The first and longest of these four novellas, ‘1922’, is a murderer’s confession: a farmer describes murdering his wife in Nebraska just after the first world war and the unexpected consequences that gradually destroy his life. It’s stark and compelling, and should be avoided at all costs by readers with a phobia of rats. In ‘Big Driver’, an author of cosy crime novels is raped and left for dead.

Blue Lightning (Macmillan, £16.99) is the fourth novel in Ann Cleeves’ excellent Shetland quartet. Blue Lightning (Macmillan, £16.99) is the fourth novel in Ann Cleeves’ excellent Shetland quartet. It is just as good as its predecessors. Cleeves has found a way to serve up many of the pleasures of the traditional mystery in an unusual modern setting. Her series detective, Jimmy Perez, returns to his own island, Fair Isle, with his artist fiancée, Fran. Autumn storms cut the island off from the rest of the world. Perez anticipated that he would suffer mild embarrassment when he introduced Fran, an outsider from the south saddled with a six-year-old daughter, to his family home.

Fever of the Bone (Little, Brown, £18.99) is the sixth novel in Val McDermid’s Jordan and Hill series. Fever of the Bone (Little, Brown, £18.99) is the sixth novel in Val McDermid’s Jordan and Hill series. Someone is using a networking website to lure young teenagers, both boys and girls, to their deaths. Meanwhile Detective Chief Inspector Jordan is struggling with the demon drink, and also with a new boss, who questions both the cost-effectiveness of her unit and the nature of her personal and professional relationship with clinical psychologist Tony Hill. As for Hill, a father whom he never knew has just left him a posh house, a lot of money he doesn’t want and yet more doubts about his own self-esteem.

For a crime writer, success comes with its dark side. As Conan Doyle learned to his cost, your readers often become obsessively attached to your series hero, while you yourself find him or her increasingly tiresome — and limiting. Ian Rankin’s well-deserved success with the genre has largely derived from his Inspector Rebus novels set in Edinburgh. When he brought the series to an apparent end with Exit Music in 2007, his readers were curious to know what lay ahead. Last year’s Doors Open, a relatively lightweight caper novel set in Edinburgh, was no more than an expanded version of a previously published short story and clearly a way of marking time. Now we know the answer. This year, Rankin returns with The Complaints, which may well be the first of a new series.

An Empty Death (Orion, £18.99) is the second instalment of the series Laura Wilson began with her previous book, the award-winning Stratton’s War. An Empty Death (Orion, £18.99) is the second instalment of the series Laura Wilson began with her previous book, the award-winning Stratton’s War. Time’s moved on to 1944, and Hitler’s doodlebugs are spreading fear and destruction through the war-weary city. But Detective Inspector Ted Strattton’s immediate concern is the murder of a doctor on a bombsite near the Middlesex Hospital in Fitzrovia and the linked activities of a medical impostor.

Dublin has a special relationship with fiction, which in recent years has inspired some excellent crime novels. Among them is Declan Hughes’s Ed Loy series, which gives a distinctively Irish twist to the flawed private investigator of American pulp fiction. Loy has many of the classic characteristics of the breed, including the tastes for hard liquor, lovely women and lost causes. But Hughes places his protagonist in a sharply observed contemporary Dublin; and his plots erupt from the city’s faultlines. In All The Dead Voices (John Murray, £16.

The Ignorance of Blood (Harper Collins, £17.99) is the fourth of Robert Wilson’s novels to feature Inspector Javier Falcon of Seville, and it completes a planned quartet examining some of the demons, old and new, plaguing modern Spain. The Ignorance of Blood (Harper Collins, £17.99) is the fourth of Robert Wilson’s novels to feature Inspector Javier Falcon of Seville, and it completes a planned quartet examining some of the demons, old and new, plaguing modern Spain. A fatal traffic accident leaves an absconding Russian gangster dead. In his Range Rover, the police find more than eight million euros, drugs, compromising DVDs and a gun. As the August heat increases, Falcon is sucked into a turf war between Russian mafiosi.