In At Risk (Little, Brown £12.99), Patricia Cornwell sets out to prove she can write crime fiction very different from the Kay Scarpetta series — shorter, pacier and closer to the more digestible output of her rival James Patterson. The book eschews grisly descriptions of corpses, and introduces Win Garano, a handsome, mixed-race, womanising Massachusetts detective whose boss is ambitious DA Monique Lamont. Fed up when Lamont bafflingly tells him to quit a forensic course and reopen a 1980s murder case in far-away Knoxville, Garano heads for her house to resign, to find her being menaced by a gunman. After rescuing her he remains in Boston, convinced the incident was not as straightforward as everyone assumes, while a local woman cop handily acts as his dogsbody in Tennessee. Scarpetta fans are likely to find this a disappointing departure, as the novel’s brevity entails coarser characterisation and less complex plotting. But there are regular reminders of her strengths, notably her gift for cracking dialogue.

It’s misleading of Annie Proulx to call Harbor (Portobello £7.99) a “disturbing thriller” on the jacket — it’s a literary novel with crime in it — but Proulx is not mistaken in also pronouncing it “brilliant”. Centring on Aziz, an Algerian stowaway given a bed by other north Africans in Boston, Lorraine Adams’s debut combines a quasi-anthropological study of life for illegal immigrants with a plot in which the FBI hounds Aziz and his housemates as suspected terrorists. Impressively imagined, it’s written with stunning stylistic flair.

Javier Sierra’s The Secret Supper (Simon & Schuster £12.99), translated by Alberto Manguel) was published in Spain a year after The Da Vinci Code appeared in America, and it may not be entirely coincidental that it too has fun with Catharism, Mary Magdalene and hidden meanings in Leonardo da Vinci’s paintings. It differs in featuring not present-day investigators, but a monkish sleuth in Italy in 1497. Agostino Leyre, a Dominican inquisitor, is sent to Milan to look into rumours of a heretical movement whose initiates may include the Duke of Milan and Da Vinci, working on The Last Supper. Sierra makes less attempt than Brown to provide a thriller plot, and too much of the novel consists of one character lecturing another. But the passages on art are provocative and absorbing.

Despite his publisher’s somewhat comical vow to “build” him into a top “brand”, it’s reassuringly difficult to discern any significant departure from John Harvey’s previous work in Darkness and Light (Heinemann £12.99). A sturdily traditional whodunnit sees retired cop Frank Elder persuaded to return from Cornwall and get back into harness in Harvey’s beloved Nottingham. A child abuse theme is the sole hint of modishness in a story in which Elder realises a recent murder was committed by a killer he failed to nail eight years ago.

Mo Hayder, in contrast, is a remarkably unpredictable author whose last novel tackled a 1930s atrocity in China. Also unusual, though not quite so ambitious, Pig Island (Bantam £12.99) begins with journalist Joe Oakes visiting a Scottish island where a faith healer he once showed to be a fraud has found a bolthole — accompanied, sensational video footage suggests, by a half-human creature with a tail. Intent on exposing fakery again, Oakes discovers the truth is more complicated in an unsettling, expertly crafted novel with a deft final twist.

Released from a Californian jail on parole after serving 10 years for bank robbery, Max Holman in Robert Crais’s The Two Minute Rule (Orion £12.99) learns that his policeman son Richie has been killed in a mysterious incident in which three other LAPD cops also died. Outstanding dialogue is the most striking quality of a slickly plotted story in which Holman teams up with former FBI agent Katherine Pollard to discover what happened.

In The Gardens of the Dead (Little Brown £14.99), William Brodrick’s follow-up to The Sixth Lamentation, Elizabeth Glendinning QC does protracted penance for securing a not-guilty verdict for Riley, a villain she defended. Helped by Anselm, a former legal colleague turned monk, and homeless George, whose life fell apart after Riley killed his son, she relentlessly brings about his downfall. Dickens is an obvious influence on Brodrick’s idiosyncratic tale, set in a London of lawyers’ chambers, convents and seedy lodging houses which has altered little since Victorian times. When cars or phone calls are mentioned, they seem anachronistic.

The award-winning poet Michael Symmons Roberts joins the lengthy list of literary authors having a go at crime in Patrick’s Alphabet (Cape £10.99), and does so with a self-confidence that suggests he could be in the running for this year’s first novel awards. His protagonist Perry Scholes is a London photographer who specialises, like Weegee, in arriving early at crime scenes. After he photographs a teenage couple murdered in their car, with a red letter A painted on a nearby wall, other letters start to appear in alphabetical sequence, and it’s usually Scholes who sees them first; this is financially handy, but makes him feel as if he’s the killer’s accomplice. Stylistically accomplished, Patrick’s Alphabet also features strong supporting characters and a distinctive “edgeland” territory, on the margin between urban and rural.

CJ Sansom’s Winter in Madrid (Macmillan £16.99) is set in 1940. Dunkirk veteran Harry Brett is sent to Spain as a spy; posing as an embassy translator, he has to discover whether a mine run by Sandy, an English businessman, could provide gold for Franco. Soon disillusioned by this assignment, he joins a dangerous bid by Sandy’s girlfriend Barbara to rescue her former lover Bernie (a leftist who fought in the civil war) from a prison camp. Though atmospheric and impeccably researched, the novel is over-long. The eventual confrontations and action sequences are well handled, but only arrive after too much uneventful scene-setting.

Reg Gadney once wrote straightforward, meat-and-two-veg spy yarns, but his recent offerings have been very strange. Immaculate Deception (Faber £10.99) again pits his recurring hero Alan Rosslyn against Terajima, a shape-changing, cross-dressing assassin whose disguises include a Buddhist monk and a Japanese businesswoman. While bumping off Russian oligarchs to order, Terajima devotes his spare time to a fiendish scheme that involves not only killing Rosslyn, but also kidnapping his pregnant fiancée in Hong Kong, flying her to London and aborting the baby in front of him. Relatively conventional chapters coexist with outlandish scenes that make Sax Rohmer’s lurid Fu Manchu capers seem sober and plausible.

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