James Lee Burke is back, and so is his Cajun Detective, Dave Robi cheaux. He was missing from the last offering, Cimarron Rose, but in Sunset Limited (Orion, £16.99 in UK) he returns to trail his way through the bayous and mangrove swamps of Southern Louisiana as a redemptive force in the face of some pretty nefarious wrongdoing. As always with Robicheaux, it is his past that throws up the seeds of present pain, and, when he discovers that Megan Flynn and her brother Cisco are back in town, he knows that he is in for trouble on the grand scale. Megan's father, a farm labour organiser, had been killed, ostensibly by the Klan, but the perpetrators had never been apprehended, and now his children are in the mood for vengeance. Then two white boys are murdered after allegedly raping a black girl, and an eyewitness identifies one of the killers as Harpo Scruggs, a low-life who had also been implicated in the death of Jack Flynn.
With the plot nicely on simmer, all Burke has to do is give it the odd stir to keep it bubbling. He is an old hand at this kind of thing, but he invariably manages to find a few new twists to keep the interest of his readers fibrillating. And, of course, his strong descriptive prose gives an almost tactile feel to the narrative, bringing the people and the place alive so that they shimmer off the page. Can't be bettered.
Next we make our way from the exotic plumage of Louisiana to the grey, rain-washed streets of Manchester, where J. Wallis Martin sets her psychological thriller The Bird Yard (Hodder & Stoughton, £16.99 in UK). This one features Detective Superintendent Parker, a bit of a cypher, but in this kind of crime novel it is the mechanics of the plot rather than the characters that matters, and Wallis Martin has a finely observed, Hitchcockian story to tell. She also employs a breathless, over-the-top prose style, which suits rather than detracts from the atmosphere of evil that she seeks to establish.
The setting is an aviary in a derelict suburb of Manchester, a place to which young people are ineluctably drawn. Then twelve-year-old Joseph Coyne goes missing, Parker begins to investigate, another lad disappears, the prime suspect is plausible and the young and vulnerable children who might give the killer up are strangely reluctant to do so. Steamy and tense, The Bird Yard is not one to be read alone at night.
From Manchester we move on to London, where Mark Timlin's anti-hero, Nick Shar man, is feeling pretty sorry for himself. In Dead Flowers (Gollancz, £16.99 in UK), Sharman's daughter, Judith, has gone to Scotland to get away from the deadbeat milieu her father inhabits. Then Ray Miller, a Lottery rollover double-jackpot winner, offers Sharman £5,000 to find the wife who has dumped him and his three-year-old son. Easy money and a chance to turn his life around and have his daughter return? Sharman thinks so, but how wrong he is.
The wife turns out to be a heroin-addicted prostitute, most of south London's villains are eager to relieve Miller of his new-found wealth, and the worst of them, the ineffable adult Baby Albert and Mr Freeze, are leaning on Sharman to force him to help them. Timlin writes of a modern Babylon, with Sharman as a fallen angel who is finding it difficult to settle into hell. There are no half measures here, death and destruction being the norm and Old Testament fire and brimstone raining down in an orgy of destruction. But old asbestos-skinned Sharman does manage to rise from the ashes, singed, bothered and bewildered, but game to the last.
On we go, this time across the Atlantic to Santa Monica, California where, in Christopher Brookmyre's Not the End of the World (Little, Brown, £12.99 in UK), local cop Larry Freeman has his work cut out protecting a porn film festival from televangelist Luther St John, whose aim it is to destroy all such evils and make the world safe for lunatics like himself. And if he has to destroy said world in the process, well, so be it. The result is a crazy, off-the-wall roller-coaster of a book that throws in not alone the kitchen sink, but the dresser, the best china and the cook herself.
Brookmyre's first two novels were set in Scotland and featured radical journalist Jack Parlabane. His clone in this one is Glaswegian freelance photographer Steff Kennedy, who gets embroiled in the action, drives Freeman to distraction and ends up finding God. But he has to go through Hell first, before discovering Heaven, which, incidentally, appears to reside in the lap of adult movie actress Katy Koxx. We should all be so lucky.
Staying in the USA, we are now in Portland, Oregon for D.W. Buffa's The Defense (No Exit Press, £10 in UK). This is a novel about lawyers, written by a lawyer. Sound familiar? As it goes, it is good of its type, with defence attorney Joseph Antonelli representing a con man and convicted drug dealer, who is accused of raping his twelve-year-old step-daughter. Posing the old conundrum of how a legal representative can morally defend a man he knows is guilty, the book strives for a depth usually lacking in this type of work. Whether it succeeds or not is a moot question.
And so to Rikersville, Georgia, where dirt-poor twenty-year-old unwed mother LuAnn Tyler is made an offer she cannot refuse in David Baldacci's The Winner (Simon & Schuster, £16.99 in UK). Put simply, she is offered the chance to be the winner in a multi-million dollar scam on the National Lottery. The person making the proposal is the demonic Mr Jackson - in the film he could be played by Robert de Niro, using the same spade beard and long nails he employed in Angel Heart - and after accepting the devious gift, LuAnn lets herself in for some terrible times. Baldacci is not exactly a master of prose and character drawing, but he does tell an exciting story that moves like an express train through some five hundred-odd pages.
Finally, we end up in Stephen King country: a small Iowa farming community where dark deeds are being committed under a surface of seeming placidity. In his first novel, Eleven Days (Fourth Estate, £9.99 in UK), Donald Harstad constructs a finely judged atmosphere of menace as his protagonist, Deputy Sheriff Carl Houseman, investigates a multiple killing that begins to uncover sinister secrets threatening the peace of his home town. Expertly written by a man who himself served as a law enforcement officer in Iowa, Eleven Days builds up suspense and holds it right through to the end. Recommended.