ASTONISHINGLY, Die a Little (Pocket Books, buy it here) was Megan Abbott's first novel. The shock is that a debutante should have managed such a difficult genre so perfectly. She writes pure American noir, circa 1950. Many authors have imita-ted the style, with some success, but you always knew that it was a copy. Abbott feels original. Lora, a teacher in Hollywood, is happy when her brother marries Alice, but she gradually discovers discrepancies in her sister-in-law's account of her past. Further inquiries drag Lora into an unfamiliar world of degradation; her own responses are frighteningly ambiguous. Controlled writing, beautifully paced, wonderful LA atmosphere.

In Eugenio Fuentes's The Pianist's Hands (EuroCrime, buy it here), the hands don't only play music; they have acquired a second life as the kil-ler of pets whose owners cannot bear or be bothered to perform the act themselves. The pianist is hired to use that talent to kill a man.

The deceased, a partner in a construction company in a Spanish town, is found at the bottom of a building, part of a luxury complex his company is erecting. But the pianist didn't do it, and he asks a private eye, Ricardo Cupido, a sad and lonely figure, to find the culprit. Fuentes is an elegant writer, the best news to come out of Spanish crime fiction since the great Manuel Vázquez Montalbán.

John Harvey's Nottingham copper Charlie Resnick last appeared in 1998. His welcome return in Cold in Hand (Heinemann, buy it here) has him in top form, living happily with his fellow officer Lynn Kellogg. She tries to break up a gang fight and the consequences are to change their lives. The strength of the novel lies in its superb evocation of a society slipping slowly into a lawlessness beyond the reach of the police. Cold in Hand also reveals Harvey as a superbly sensitive writer of love and loss.

If you only buy one book this Christmas make sure it's...

Michael Parkinson, Sheila Hancock, Roger Moore, Elaine Paige and Andrew Castle pick out some perfect reading for the festive period

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Mark Billingham proves that he can write superlatively even without the aid of his regular cop Tom Thorne. In the Dark (Little, Brown, buy it here) is a convincing port-rayal of the inner workings of two communities - cops and villains - each with its flaws and redemptive features. A young budding gangster fires his gun at a car, causing it to swerve and kill a man waiting for a bus. He turns out to be an off-duty cop. His eight months' pregnant girlfriend, dissatisfied with the official version of events, digs deeper and discovers unpalatable facts about her dead lover. Little by little, and with brilliant dialogue, Billingham unravels the incident and convincingly illuminates the damaged lives on both sides of the law-and-order struggle.

Val McDermid's A Darker Domain (HarperCollins, buy it here ) is her most personal and most political novel, and one of her best. The traumatic events of the 1984 national strike in a coal-mining community in Fife re-emerge 23 years later when a woman walks into a police station and reports her father missing. He was last seen during the strike. The “wee fat woman” inspector in charge of cold cases inquires and unearths a story of shame, betrayal and tragic stubbornness. Passionate and moving.

The debate over whether Kate Atkinson's When Will There Be Good News? (Doubleday, buy it here) is or isn't a crime novel is unnecessary. Of course it is. It starts with a brutal slaying, missing persons abound, and two of the book's main characters are detectives - Jackson Brodie, police investigator turned private eye, hero of Atkinson's first two forays into crime fiction, and a policewoman who has come tell the survivor of that multiple murder 30 years ago that the killer is being released from prison. The virtuoso Atkinson juggles spectacularly with several plots and complicated characters, all interlinked. Totally beguiling.

My Scandinavian discovery of the year is Matti Joensuu, Finland's most popular crime writer. To Steal her Love (EuroCrime, buy it here) is his tenth novel (the third translated into English) featuring Detective Sergeant Timo Harjunpää of the Helsinki force (where Joensuu himself spent his whole working life).

He's an unassuming, slightly melancholic, rather ordinary policeman, going through a mild mid-life crisis; his adversary is a lock-picking expert who enters women's apartments merely to gaze on them sleeping.

The 2008 collection of The Best American Mystery Stories (Quercus, buy it here), edited by George Pelecanos , contains several gems and hardly a dud. The score of contributors include Michael Connelly and James Lee Burke, but also, less predictably, Alice Munro and Joyce Carol Oates. Many of the stories are by writers not well known here, but no less talented for that.

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