Locked-room mysteries have a long pedigree in crime fiction. They fell out of fashion as the mechanics of murder began to take second place to questions about the psychology of killers, so it is brave of Frank Tallis to return to the form in Mortal Mischief (Century £10.99), his first crime novel. In this instance, a beautiful medium is found shot dead in a locked room in the Viennese apartment where she used to hold seances. The book is set in 1902, which means that Inspector Oskar Rheinhardt, the detective in charge of the case, is able to consult his friend Max Liebermann, a disciple of Freud. Liebermann uses the new discipline of psycho-analysis to identify the most likely suspect among the dead woman’s clients, but the key to solving the case turns out to lie in the hands of an English governess he is treating for hysteria. This debut novel in a series is original and intriguing, situated at a moment when the superstitions of the old century are dissolving under the bold scientific scrutiny of its successor.

Jacqueline Winspear’s Birds of a Feather (J Murray £10) is set in Britain a decade after the end of the first world war. Her private detective, Maisie Dobbs (a working-class girl making her own way in London, with the help of aristocratic patrons), is called in to investigate the disappearance of the daughter of a millionaire grocer, which is quickly followed by the murders of two of her friends. What makes the novel stand out is Winspear’s insight into the continuing effects of the war and the sometimes discreditable role played in it by women.

Susan Hill’s second book in the Simon Serrailler series, The Pure in Heart (Chatto £12.99), is very much an old-fashioned crime novel. Set in a cathedral city and featuring a sensitive professional detective who is also an accomplished painter, it owes a great deal to both PD James and Ruth Rendell in terms of character and setting.

Detective Chief Inspector Serrailler has to deal with the disappearance of a schoolboy, his romantic feelings for a murdered colleague and the moral complexities of euthanasia. As issue-driven and obsessed with romantic sub-plots as a soap opera, Hill’s crime novels are dull, snobbish and sentimental. They are also unleavened by humour, except for delicious asides such as her observation that a minor character “had been dealt a terrifying blow when the acupuncturist who had treated her had been revealed as a psychopathic serial murderer”. Don’t you just hate the way so many alternative therapists turn out like that?

Andrew Holmes’s 64 Clarke (Sceptre £10.99) — the title is a reference to the address in north London where several of the characters live — is also about an abducted child, but he and Hill could be living on different planets. Holmes’s London is a violent place where the streetwise survive and the gullible are soon parted from their money, although even they occasionally demonstrate an alarming capacity for revenge. The book starts with Patrick Snape, a 36-year-old Arsenal fan, waiting for the Tube at Finsbury Park. The train arrives, there is an altercation and Patrick realises too late that his six-year-old son has boarded it without him. The scene is caught on CCTV, a device familiar from real-crime television programmes in which viewers can watch robberies and abductions without the power to intervene. Powerlessness is a theme of Holmes’s novel as various characters, including a recently released prisoner called Max and a small-time crook known as Dash, struggle to escape the vicious criminal netherworld in which they find themselves. The child’s kidnap sounds a sombre note in this picaresque novel about a bunch of petty criminals.

David Lawrence’s Cold Kill (M Joseph £12.99) and Stephen Leather’s Soft Target (Hodder £18.99) are both hard-boiled cop novels, written in a way that captures some of the urgency of large investigations. In Soft Target, an undercover cop posing as a hired killer is on the verge of trapping a crooked businessman when a battered wife tries to hire him to murder her husband. When he is diverted into another inquiry, into an elite group of cops who have started ripping off from drug dealers, the two operations collide in an unexpected way; this is a breathless, exciting narrative about a male-dominated world and its peculiar loyalties.

Cold Kill is the third novel to feature Detective Sergeant Stella Mooney, a tough cop who is head and shoulders above most of her rivals in this crowded field. The novel opens with the discovery of a woman’s body in London’s Holland Park, in what appears to be the latest in a spate of serial killings, but Mooney is uneasy about the man who turns up at a police station and confesses. The female characters are unusually well drawn and the novel’s baroque twists turn what might have been a routine serial-killer investigation into a superior thriller.

Like most of Michael Ridpath’s novels, On the Edge (M Joseph £12.99) starts well. Jennifer Tan is a junior trader in a big City firm and her bosses are horrified when she accuses one of their rising stars of sexual harassment; Ridpath used to be a bond trader himself and he is good on the pressures women face in the macho world of high finance. When Jen apparently commits suicide, her boss Alex Calder leaves the company in disgust — only to hear a year later that one of her colleagues has disappeared in suspicious circumstances. Ridpath’s imagination starts to run away with itself as the plot progresses, producing a melodramatic ending at odds with the measured pace of the early chapters.

After the bravura performance of her last novel, Reggie Nadelson is on slightly muted form in Red Hook (Heinemann £12.99). Perhaps the anxiety of her Russian-American detective, Artie Cohen, is infectious; Cohen is understandably on edge when an old friend insists on seeing him on the very day he is due to get married. Artie drives to Red Hook, where the friend lives, and witnesses a corpse being dragged out of the river. It is the beginning of a complicated tale of old enmities and betrayal that disappoints only by the high standards Nadelson has set herself in her compelling series of detective novels.

All available at Books First prices plus on 0870 165 8585

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