MINETTE WALTERS IS IN that small minority of first division crime-fiction writers that does not rely on the regular appearance of a series character. The disadvantage is that readers cannot form an allegiance with a particular cop or private detective, eagerly looking forward to and automatically buying, his or her next adventure.

The advantage is that the writer is not shackled by formula, not obliged to keep inventing new stories to fit the characters and settings devised. So many promising authors have been found wanting when, around about their fourth book, it has become apparent that they have run out of good ideas for their main characters to inhabit.

Walters has made the most of the freedom she chose. The Devil’s Feather is her twelfth novel. Each has been different. They range from old-fashioned whodunnits to psychological thrillers, all by way of narratives in which the crimes serve to highlight important social issues.

What they have in common is beautiful writing, intelligence, tension and the capacity to chill and grip. The Devil’s Feather is not her best, but it shows again her versatility.

Connie Burns is a hardened Reuters correspondent in her mid-thirties, accustomed to reporting from the world’s trouble-spots. In the aftermath of the civil war in Sierra Leone in 2002, she comes across a nasty but influential British mercenary whom she believes to be a violent sexual deviant and the killer of several women. Two years later, on assignment in Baghdad, she sees him again, bearing another name, MacKenzie, but apparently continuing his psychopathic behaviour. Her attempts to expose him and bring him to justice fail. She is kidnapped on the way to the airport and held hostage, but released a few days later. She refuses to reveal details of her ordeal; MacKenzie is somehow involved.

On her return to England, traumatised by her experience, obsessed by MacKenzie and frightened that he will follow and kill her, Burns rents Barton House, a remote farmhouse in Dorset in which to hide, recover and write a book. She meets her strange neighbour, Jess Derbyshire, a reclusive loner with five fearsome mastiffs, and becomes enmeshed in sinister goings-on to do with the dysfunctional family owning Barton House. Murky secrets abound.

At the same time, by e-mail correspondence, she’s trying to keep up with MacKenzie’s movements. He’s back in England, she believes, and her elderly parents are now in danger. As you would expect from Walters, the whole is suffused with an aura of lurking menace.

It would not be fair to reveal what happens when the various threads of Burns’s troubled existence unite, except that there are surprises, shocks and bloody scenes. This is high octane, on-the-edge stuff, at which Walters excels. But Burns and Derbyshire are figures a little too exaggerated to be convincing, neither of them sympathetic. That does not stop The Devil’s Feather from being engrossing reading.

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