You can’t see it, you can’t smell it, and you can’t taste it, hear it or touch it but it’s all around us and it has the potential to be deadly. In the right (or rather wrong) hands, it can kill and in the hands of a killer with a grudge it might just be the ultimate weapon of destruction – how can you guard against an attack using something that’s all around us? It doesn’t need to be smuggled through security or bought from a dodgy rogue nation or flown into airspace and spread through strange carrier systems. Electricity is the killer already in our midst and it’s the technique chosen by the deadly killer or killers at the heart of Jeffrey Deaver’s latest novel The Burning Wire. The setting is New York City, the time is now and the man with the job of preventing a quite literal melt-down in the city is Deaver’s most successful forensic super sleuth, the wheelchair bound Lincoln Rhyme.

Jeffery Deaver

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The Burning Soul is the tenth full-length novel from John Connolly to feature Charlie Parker as the central character. The books could best be characterised as thrillers with supernatural overtones. Towards the beginning of the series (which started with Every Dead Thing), the novels were characterised by extreme and graphic violence, but, as the series has evolved, Connolly has more and more relied on fine descriptive prose to build tension and a sense of menace which only occasionally explodes.

John Connolly

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Guido Guerrieri is a defence counsel lawyer living and working in the city of Bari on Italy’s Adriatic coast. He runs his own small but successful office with a team of loyal staff and has plenty of business to keep things ticking over nicely so when an old friend, a criminal lawyer, asks him to take on some work that he feels is not his area of expertise, Guido reluctantly listens to what he has to say. A young woman, a student from Bari but living in Rome has gone missing and, with little to work on, the police are about to shelve the case. Manuela’s family hope that Guerrieri can run a legal eye over the paperwork and spot any errors in the police handling of the investigation that might give them the leverage they need to get the case re-opened.

Gianrico Carofiglio

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“Matryoshka is the word of the day”, says one of the characters in One Good Turn by Kate Atkinson, her second crime novel to feature Jackson Brodie. And the structure of the book does seem to take its lead from the Russian nesting dolls which crop up from time to time throughout the story. I tend to like books with a strong structure, and certainly Atkinson adopts one here; she is playing with the form of the crime novel, although not to the detriment of either plot or character development.

One Good Turn picks up Jackson Brodie about two years after the end of Case Histories. He is visiting Edinburgh during the festival along with his actress girlfriend, who is performing in a play.

Kate Atkinson

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Deep in the stillness of a remote Norwegian forest, there stands a house with a view over a lake. A quiet queue of people stands at the door to the house, patiently waiting their turn. Old and young, male and female, in small groups or alone, everyone waits silently for the person in the house to answer their unspoken pleas. On the other side of the door there lives an author, a writer whose job it is to tell the tale of each person in the queue. Once a year she invites the next person in line to come into the house and have their story told by her. At the front of the queue tonight is a young woman with a dead baby in her arms, but as the author retires to bed wondering what the woman’s story will be, she is startled to hear the front door open and footsteps hesitantly mount the stairs. A man enters the author’s bedroom and stands at the foot of her bed. He is a socially awkward middle aged man who fears his tale might be too nondescript to tell, and he has jumped the queue to speak to the author directly. After some discussion, the author is drawn into naming this man – Alvar Eide – and to ignoring the young woman who waits outside in favour of writing Alvar’s story.

Karin Fossum

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London, 1949: DI Ted Stratton sets off with a colleague to look for the bodies of a young mother and her baby daughter. Hours earlier in Wales, John Evans, the woman’s husband and the baby’s father, had walked into a police station in Wales and confessed to the killings. It looks like a straightforward case for Stratton but by the time Evans has been brought back to London he has changed his story, blaming Norman Backhouse, another man living in the same building. In spite of some unanswered questions that make Stratton feel uneasy, Evans is tried and found guilty of the murder of the child, and goes to the gallows continuing to protest his innocence.

Several months later at the house where Evans lived the bodies of several women are found buried in the garden and hidden behind the walls.

Laura Wilson

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An Agent of Deceit is an intelligent and convincing thriller set in the world of international finance. The story is told alternatively from the perspective of two lead characters.

Lock is a Dutch lawyer, brought up in the UK, who is employed by a shadowy Russian businessman. Over the course of a decade or so finds himself irrevocably tied to an increasingly complex network of companies whose chief purpose appears to be to disguise the passage of large sums of money originating somewhere in Russia. Lock is the ostensible owner of the entire network while retaining a very low media profile, but in practice is irrevocably in thrall to his mysterious Russian boss.

Chris Morgan Jones

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The End of the Wasp Season is 2nd in a series about DS Alex Morrow, a Glaswegian police detective who was introduced in Still Midnight, although I think it could be enjoyed by someone who has not read that book.

It is a crime novel but there is not much of a mystery for the reader, as the story opens with the murder of a young woman, Sarah, in a big house by two teenage boys. One strand of the narrative is about Thomas, one of the killers, and the background to his action. Another is about the police investigation into the crime, led by Morrow, and also about the politics of her workplace.

Denise Mina

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The first few pages of The Body in the Back Seat seem to slow you down, possibly because the drama of the car thief spotting a body in the back seat of the car he has just stolen is a little underwhelming. And because the identity of the body is obvious from the moment the man’s wife goes to the police station and tries to report him missing but the author refrains from confirming our suspicions till much later.

However from the moment Senior Inspector Saralkar comes onstage with PI Motkar at his side, the book picks up. Saralkar is convinced that the apparent suicide victim has been murdered and he is equally convinced that one of the family or a business partner must have done it, since that is his pet psychological theory.

Salil Desai

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For many people the discovery of an Urdu penny dreadful may be an eye opener, but Chennai based Blaft publications tied up with Tranquebar to bring out the four novels which belonged to Ibne Safi’s Jasusi Duniya series. Ibne Safi, born in Allahabad district, migrated to Karachi and there steadily churned out four novels a month, the first of which Dil-e-Mujrim, was priced at less than a rupee when it came out the 1940’s. The world he describes is a cosmopolitan one, a city that has no name or location though it is somewhere in Hindustan. This unique metro boasts bars called Arlecchino and Rialto where beautiful girls in short skirts smoke and drink and rub shoulders with criminals of the likes of the evil American Doctor Dread or the four foot high Finch who can masquerade as a monkey thanks to his agility.

Ibne Safi

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Set in recession hit Dublin, this first novel in a planned new series introduces Detective Inspector Jo Birmingham. She is having a bit of a tough time. Her marriage has broken up, and it doesn’t help that her ex is her boss and is living with his secretary. Her teenage son Rory is worrying her, and she has a young baby too. She is desperate for a chance to prove herself at work. When a murder investigation comes up she asks to lead on it.

At the start of the story I was a bit taken aback by the number of personal problems experienced by the characters – Jo’s colleague Gavin Sexton’s wife committed suicide 18 months ago, and there’s a local crime reporter whose daughter has been abducted and abused, and is still too traumatised by the experience to speak about it.

Niamh O'Connor

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