AS WE PREPARE to say goodbye to George W. Bush, there could be no better reminder of his legacy - if not necessarily a description of the US President himself - than A Most Wanted Man (Hodder & Stoughton, £18.99/offer £17.09), a pointed farewell from the doyen of British thriller writers John le Carré. An ageing Scottish banker based in Hamburg falls for a young female lawyer who brings to his door a half-Russian, half-Chechen, half-mad orphan of the early-21st century's atrocities who has come to claim a poisonous legacy from the Cold War.But it is the “War on Terror” with its intrusions on individual liberty, and its shady agents of “extraordinary rendition”, that play out the final chapter in a beautifully written, excruciatingly painful, cynical story of our times.

Also a story of our times - but only just - is Sebastian Faulks's ridiculously enjoyable reincarnation as Ian Fleming in Devil May Care (Penguin, £18.99/£17.09) a new James Bond book turned out to give the franchise a further lease on seeming immortality. Faulks gives us all the old favourite ingredients: an evil villain with a congenital deformity - main de singe: a hand like a monkey's - car chases, brutally competitive sports - tennis here - and steamy sex with almost identical twins. Faulks dishes up our spies the way we wish they were, sugar-coated, as opposed to le Carré's bitter reality.

Still in the world of spooks, the best plot to emerge from a rash of thrillers that tried and mostly failed to cash in on the Beijing Olympics is Charles Cummings's Typhoon (Michael Joseph, £18.99/£17.09). Anglo-American tension here has the extra dimension of a love triangle played out over a decade, from the British withdrawal from Hong Kong to Beijing 2008. In the foreground are the rumblings from Islamic militant separatists in China's western provinces. Cummings gives us complex characters and a world-weariness that owe more to Smiley than Bond and mark him out as in the first rank of the new generation of espionage writers.

Every bit as firmly set in the real world - in fact frighteningly so - is Ritual (Bantam, £14.99/£13.49), in which Mo Hayder has definitively (I hope) repatriated her fiction from its self-indulgent Far Eastern wanderings to the less exotic location of Bristol, but has brought back Detective Jack Caffrey. Caffrey has exotica enough to deal with when a female police diver called Flea discovers severed hands in Bristol's “floating harbour”. She and Jack are sucked into a world of African superstitions, ritual mutilations, underage prostitution and drug abuse. This is the first in a new Caffrey series entitled The Walking Man that will take over where the grim world of her landmark novels Birdman and The Treatment left off.

Another female frightener coming up hard on Hayder's heels is S.J. Bolton, whose own début, Sacrifice (Bantam, £10) , gives us an obstetrician heroine on the Shetlands faced with a rash of unexplained deaths among young mothers and a sinister male cult with roots in centuries-old traditions. A feminist's “told-you-so” nightmare.

Also in the fast lane of home-grown talent exploiting the brutal side of modern Britain, Simon Kernick has his foot firmly pressed on the adrenalin accelerator in Relentless (Bantam, £10/£16.19). Health club owner Andrea Devern finds her daughter kidnapped and a half million pound ransom demand, while her husband has gone inexplicably missing. The only man she can turn to is an old flame who is also a hard case and just might be the missing girl's father. But is he any good?

Anyone looking for a conspiracy back story to Barack Obama's election to the US presidency could do worse than get stuck into Stephen Carter's The Palace Council (Cape, £17.99/£16.19), which takes us on an unfamiliar ride through the corridors of (black) power in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. A Forsyte Saga for mid-20th century Harlem.

Chris Ewan's The Good Thief's Guide to Amsterdam (Long Barn Books, £6.99/£6.64) is a quirky caper concerning three monkeys - the see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil variety - which turn out to be keys to the root of all evil: a fortune in stolen diamonds. In an engaging romp around canabis cafés and red light districts, Charlie Howard, struggling author and part-time cat burglar, is sent to steal back a missing monkey and brave the wrath of a femme fatale. All that's missing is a Pink Panther.

And for a bit of Christmas Victoriana archaeologist turned novelist Tony Pollard's The Minutes of the Lazarus Club (Michael Joseph, £12.99/£11.69) is an engaging period murder mystery set amid the fog and industrial upheaval of mid-19th century London. Pollard brings together such grand characters as Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Charles Darwin and Joseph Bazalgette, all members of a secretive club that comes under investigation when mutilated bodies are washed up in the Thames.

Explore Books

• Book Extracts

• Book Reviews

• Books Group

• Audio Books

Times Recommends

• The 100 Best Books of the Decade
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• The conversation: James Ellroy