The protagonist of Danny Leigh’s The Monsters of Gramercy Park (Faber £10.99) is Lizbeth Greene, a successful but nervy and heroin-addicted crime-writer. Unable to think up a plot for her next novel, she decides instead to write the biography of Wilson Velez, a charismatic New York gang leader given three life sentences for murder. As she interviews him in jail, the balance of power gradually shifts: at first a broken, mumbling figure, Velez becomes assertive, insisting on more control of his story, threatening to halt their collaboration and accusing her of not sharing her own secrets. He becomes an author, too, producing children’s tales about naughty flying gargoyles (the titular monsters) that are snapped up by her publisher. Only an anticlimactic ending disappoints in Leigh’s second novel, which is by some distance the most absorbingly original of the works considered here: the adroitly ambiguous characterisation of Velez and the clever interplay between the children’s stories and his relationship with Greene are its outstanding features.

Joan Brady, a former Whitbread prize-winner, joins the swelling ranks of literary novelists trying their hand at crime, in Bleedout (Simon & Schuster £12.99) which follows the hunt for the murderer of Hugh Freyl, a distinguished Illinois lawyer who was blind (and whose elegant account of his life serves as a counterpoint to the main narrative). David Marion, Freyl’s pupil and protégé, is the prime suspect, because the pair met in jail when Marion was serving a sentence for murder. Aided by the dead man’s former PA and lover, he secures a fortunate alibi and turns detective, quizzing Freyl’s patrician relatives and business colleagues with the backing of the family’s fearsome matriarch. Anyone reading this, unaware of Brady’s track record, would assume she was a lifelong pulp-fiction specialist.

Dr Cat Ferry, the heroine of Greg Iles’s Blood Money (Hodder £14.99), is called in by New Orleans police who hope her expertise in tooth imprints can identify a serial killer. But Ferry is an unstable though gutsy character, still dealing with a traumatic past including the murder of her father; and the case, in which child abuse is a key factor, compels her to confront her own ghosts at her childhood home in Mississippi: was her father killed by a burglar, as she was told? Or by her grandfather, perhaps for abusing her? If you can suspend your disbelief over the number of handicaps Iles asks his (alcoholic, pregnant and mentally ill) heroine to overcome, this is a well-sustained and refreshingly unusual concoction.

David Baldacci’s Hour Game (Macmillan £17.99) finds Michelle Maxwell and Sean King, the former Secret Service detectives who figured in Split Second, chasing a fiend who mockingly mimics the MO of a different notorious serial slayer with each new murder and leaves the victims’ watches stopped at significant times. As the body count mounts, members of the Dallas-like and somewhat stereotypical Battle family (philandering father, feisty mother, smouldering daughter, artist son) and their employees become both suspects and victims. After the first few killings, the novel turns into an old-fashioned closed-community whodunit, lightly disguised by the murderer’s grisly methods and hi-tech devices; it resembles an Agatha Christie or Midsomer Murders mystery relocated to Virginia. Baldacci’s plotting, as ever, is formidably accomplished.

George Pelecanos’s Drama City (Orion £12.99) divides its attention between two citizens of Washington DC who are trying to put their pasts behind them. Lorenzo Brown, a former enforcer for a drug gang, has just emerged from jail and now works for an animal protection organisation. Rachel Lopez, Brown’s probation officer, is a recovering alcoholic who mistrusts men. Both get caught up in an escalating feud between two gangs — Brown because one is led by a friend, Lopez because the tension results in a motiveless attack on her by a psychopath. Pelecanos has long been preoccupied with youth crime, but normally embeds his sociological material in stories involving his black PI Derek Strange. A writer who rarely bothers to set up a mystery, he here strips away the detective, too; so readers looking for the genre’s traditional pleasures are likely to be disappointed. But if you want journalistic realism about inner-city life, not lurid and twisty storytelling, he’s your man.

Blue Rondo (Weidenfeld £12.99), John Lawton’s fifth novel featuring London murder-squad detective Frederick Troy, is largely set in the run-up to the 1959 election. Troy’s opponents are the murderous Ryan twins, who are extending their crime empire eastwards from the West End and have politicians in their pockets; yet despite this hard-fought struggle and a blast injury that nearly forces his retirement, the priapic sleuth manages to bed so many women (including his own sister) that it becomes difficult to remember which is which. Lawton’s fiction is clearly comparable to Jake Arnott’s, both in the period it covers and in reworking the stories of real people. The difference is that whereas Arnott earnestly attempts a counter-history of the post-war decades, Lawton seems more intent on having fun with them through a kind of fantastic reinvention.

After Midnight (Review £14.99), the latest in Rob Ryan’s series of costume thrillers, is a double narrative in which the central figure in the second-world-war plot is Bill Carr, a British pilot attached to an Italian partisan group as liaison officer. Twenty years later, Carr’s daughter hires Jack Kirby, who flies planes for sky-divers in Italy, to find her father’s body and look into his mysterious death. His inquiries gradually point to tensions between Carr and the partisans as a factor — and the reason why whoever is menacing him wants to halt the investigation. Ryan’s mastery of 1940s detail and his ability to discover intriguing but unvisited byways of the war can be taken for granted; but the more recent storyline shows him equally adept at handling a 1960s setting. Arnott and Lawton will need to watch out.

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