The best crime novels are a barometer of contemporary life, incorporating real events which other types of fiction struggle to respond to. This is particularly true of the Twin Towers terrorist attacks that are a brooding presence in Reggie Nadelson’s latest Artie Cohen mystery, even though the book is mostly set in Brooklyn rather than Manhattan. Cohen is a brilliant creation, a Russian-American detective who has put his past behind him, or so he thinks until the edgy atmosphere in his adopted country reminds him that anyone of foreign origin is now suspect. A Disturbed Earth (Heinemann £12.99) is set 18 months after 9/11 and Cohen is back on the police force after a spell as a private eye. He is an archetypal fictional detective, with a messy divorce behind him and a hopeless track record with women, but Nadelson transcends the stock features of the genre. Her writing is strikingly confident, with barely a word out of place, and the disappearance of Cohen’s godson allows her to draw a picture of the lives of Russian immigrants in Brooklyn, embracing America but never quite at ease.

Christopher Brookmyre’s Be My Enemy (Little, Brown £10.99) is, at first sight, a classic crime novel in which a group of apparently unconnected people are brought together in a remote location and find themselves targeted by a killer. A favourite Agatha Christie plot, it has seldom been executed with such savagery and mordant wit. The setting is a draughty Scottish mansion whose owner, in an attempt to restore the family fortunes, is going into the business of corporate team-building weekends, complete with paint guns. When the guests assemble, they appear to be a random crew of PR women, City types up from London, computer experts and a stroppy journalist whose photographer, usefully as it turns out, has connections with the Security Service. When the group comes under attack as they cross an old army firing range, it seems part of the fun — until headless corpses start turning up. This is not a novel for those with weak stomachs but it is achingly funny, a Scottish version of Straw Dogs with sharp political observation.

Rebecca Pawel’s Law of Return (Soho Press £16.99), set in Franco’s Spain not long after the end of the civil war, is political in a very different way. The novel’s main character, Carlos Tejada, is one of the dictator’s detested civil guards, but he is a decent man who tries to put old hatreds behind him when he arrives at a new posting in Salamanca. One of his tasks is to monitor a group of former academics, sacked from their jobs for supporting the university’s rector, the novelist and poet Miguel de Unamuno, who was removed from his post by a Falangist general in 1936. Unamuno is the only real person in Pawel’s novel, which centres on the murder of one of the disgraced professors and an attempt to rescue a Jewish academic from Hitler’s Germany. This is a beguiling first novel by a young American writer, even if the romantic subplot does not entirely convince.

Peter Robinson, by contrast, is an established British crime novelist whose Chief Inspector Banks series has many admirers. Playing with Fire (Macmillan £15.99) picks up the story as Banks and his sidekick, Inspector Annie Cabbot, put their affair behind them and try to rebuild their professional relationship. The novel begins with a ferocious fire on a couple of narrow boats in which two people perish: an artist and a young heroin addict, whose boyfriend tells the police that she was sexually abused by her stepfather. The first thing Banks has to decide is who was the intended victim, a question that starts to become clearer when a second man dies in almost identical circumstances. Robinson knows his characters well, but he depends too much on familiar devices, such as the inspector’s taste in music, to stand out from a crowded field.

Susan Hill’s first crime novel is flagged as the beginning of a series featuring Chief Inspector Simon Serrailler. Hill is a prize-winning novelist, shortlisted in the past for the Booker prize, and her foray into the genre naturally raises expectations. The Various Haunts of Men (Chatto £12.99) is set in an English cathedral town where Detective Sergeant Freya Graffham, newly arrived from London and the obligatory unhappy marriage, suspects that a serial killer is at work. From this point, just about everything goes wrong. The provincial setting is too close to Ruth Rendell’s Kingsmarkham, while Serrailler — the ascetic detective who is also a successful artist — is a younger version of P D James’s Dalgliesh. The characters are unconvincing (especially a chirpy working-class DC) and Freya’s passion for Serrailler elbows the plot to one side for long periods.

It is a relief to turn to Robert B Parker, who serves up the usual agreeable mix of fraud, adultery, murder and jokes in Bad Business (J Murray £17.99). Parker’s Boston holds no surprises but his plots work, his dialogue entertains and Pearl the Wonder Dog brightens up sections of the book where not much happens. Few detectives could drag Chrétien de Troyes and courtly love into a case without sounding pretentious, but Spenser pulls it off. Perfect, undemanding summer reading.

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