Cornwell, Leonard and a Troubles thriller

CRIME BEAT: RED MIST(£18.99, Little, Brown) is the 19th novel to feature Patricia Cornwell's renowned forensic pathologist, Kay Scarpetta. The novel opens with Scarpetta on her way to Georgia Prison for Women, to meet the mother of the woman who tried to kill Scarpetta at the end of Cornwell's previous offering, Port Mortuary(2010).

This promising opening soon gives way to something of a soap opera, as a number of Scarpetta’s supporting cast rush to join her in Georgia, while the investigation into the innocence of a woman awaiting execution on death row plays second fiddle to Scarpetta’s carping at finding herself outside her comfort zone. It’s appropriate, perhaps, that the author’s style echoes that of a forensic examination, as Scarpetta’s first-person account proceeds by way of a precise, sterile exploration of even the most minute detail. The pace is funereal, dramatic events are few and far between, and the archly delivered dialogue and Scarpetta’s self-aggrandising justifications quickly become irritating.

The Impossible Dead(£18.99, Orion) is Ian Rankin's second novel in the Malcolm Fox series, Fox being a police officer working for the Scottish internal-affairs division, aka the Complaints. An allegation of improper conduct against a police officer prompts Fox to investigate the suspicious death of a radical lawyer who campaigned for Scottish independence during the 1980s, which in turn leads to the uncovering of dark secrets relating to paramilitary terrorism.

Rankin's deftly observed character sketches and understated style belie the story's building momentum, as Fox and his colleagues, despised by their peers, doggedly pursue a truth that no one is particularly interested in seeing come to light. A seamless blend of the personal and the political, The Impossible Deadis a subversive treatise on modern democracy masquerading as a police procedural, and a thoroughly entertaining thriller to boot.

Matthew F Jones's A Single Shot(£9.99, Mulholland Books) has much in common with the country noir of Daniel Woodrell. While tracking a wounded deer through the backwoods fringing his farm, Moon fires blind into a thicket of trees when the deer charges, only to discover that he has shot dead a young woman. Traumatised but determined not to go to prison for a simple mistake, Moon finds himself drawn into a sordid and potentially lethal game of tit for tat when he buries the girl and makes off with the money he discovers in her backpack. As his doomed protagonist thrashes about in a futile attempt to escape the tightening noose, Jones's story evolves into a morality play infused with strains of Greek tragedy, a hard-boiled but poignant tale of a man deranged by guilt and undone by pitiless fate.

The kidnap of a young girl provides the narrative tension in Margie Orford's Daddy's Girl(£12.99, Atlantic Books), particularly as the girl's father, Capt Riedwaan of the South African police force, has previously abducted the child. Can investigative journalist Clare Hart believe Riedwaan when he says that his daughter has been taken by gang members bent on perverting Riedwaan's investigation into their takeover of Cape Town's ghettoes? Orford peels back the layers of postapartheid South Africa in her series of Clare Hart novels, of which this is the third, here revealing a society still at war with itself and capable of heartbreaking savageries, in particular the gang members' sexual violence towards young girls who are, as often as not, their own daughters. Tautly told, pacy and direct, this powerful, angry broadside asks hard questions of the macho culture from which it springs, offering little by way of easy consolation.

Elmore Leonard's 44th novel, Djibouti(£7.99, Phoenix), has for its backdrop the Horn of Africa. An American film-maker, Dara Barr, sets out to make a documentary about the pirates who prey on commercial shipping off the coast of Somalia. She quickly encounters a host of idiosyncratic characters: Billy Wynn, an eccentric Texas billionaire who appears to be operating as a one-man anti-terrorist secret service; the pirate leader Idris Mohammed and his Oxford-educated weapons dealer friend, Sheikh Ari "Harry" Bakar; and James Russell, an American-born al-Qaeda operative with designs on blowing up an oil tanker captured by the pirates.

A dialogue-driven yarn, Djiboutimanages to be both blackly comic and rooted in the grimmest of realities, with Leonard also shoehorning in a measure of postmodern playfulness, as Dara and her cameraman, Xavier, provide a running commentary on the business of storytelling while they put together their documentary film. It's a trick reminiscent of Chili Palmer's Hollywood screenwriting experience in Leonard's Get Shorty (1990), and Djibouti is a return to form from the old master that deserves to be measured against his finest work.

The Carrickfergus writer Adrian McKinty plunges into the dark heart of Northern Ireland's Troubles in The Cold Cold Ground(£12.99, Serpent's Tail), as Det Sgt Sean Duffy finds himself investigating a series of linked murders against the backdrop of the hunger strikes in the spring of 1981. The setting represents an extraordinarily tense scenario in itself, but the fact that Duffy is a Catholic in a predominantly Protestant RUC adds yet another fascinating twist to McKinty's neatly crafted plot. Written in a terse style, the novel is a literary thriller that is as concerned with exploring the poisonously claustrophobic demi-monde of Northern Ireland during the Troubles, and the self-sabotaging contradictions of its place and time, as it is with providing the genre's conventional thrills and spills. The result is a masterpiece of Troubles crime fiction: had David Peace, Eoin McNamee and Brian Moore sat down to brew up the great Troubles novel, they would have been very pleased indeed to have written The Cold Cold Ground.

Declan Burke is a journalist and author. His latest novel is Absolute Zero Cool(Liberties Press)