John Harvey’s series of ten novels with the Nottingham copper Charlie Resnick as hero was among the finest crime fiction of the late 1980s and 1990s. After a gap, Harvey has returned to the genre, though not with Resnick. Flesh and Blood (Heinemann, £12.99; offer £10.39, p&p £2.25; Buy the book) is a terrific comeback, restoring Harvey to the very top echelons of British crime writing.

Frank Elder has retired early from the Nottinghamshire force and crept into solitary depression after the traumatic end to his marriage. The release on parole from prison of Shane Donald, a killer he’d helped to put inside, forces him to brood on one of his few failures — the vanishing of a 16-year-old girl in 1988 in circumstances similar to that of the girl whom Donald and his friend had murdered. But the police had never been able to find Susan Blacklock, nor pin her disappearance on Donald. Elder delves into the past, unofficially reopening the case, to the distress of many of those involved at the time.

Now another 16-year-old girl disappears and Shane Donald goes on the run. Is this a deliberate repetition, with Donald fulfilling a promise he made to his former co-killer? Elder’s investigations suddenly assume urgency. There’s nothing particularly original about the plot (except for its resolution); what takes Flesh and Blood into the highest league are Harvey’s exquisite writing and utterly convincing characters.

Also on top form is George Pelecanos, chronicler of crime in the United States’s capital city. But his is not the Washington of Congress, the White House and the politics of power. Pelecanos’s novels reek of the streets where crime, drugs and poverty flourish and politicians are rarely spotted. His last three books have featured Derek Strange, a black ex-cop turned private eye, investigating the murky crimes of the vicious and the dispossessed.

In Hard Revolution (Orion, £12.99; offer £10.39, p&p £2.25; Buy the book), he looks back to Strange’s youth and early years on the force; good as it is, it will probably mean more to readers already familiar with Strange. The question raised is a fundamental one: why would a young black man, whose family has suffered greatly from racial oppression, join a largely white, racist police?

Most of the people he knew as a youth, including his own brother, turned to drugs and crime. He escaped, though only to be treated with suspicion and contempt both by his fellow white officers and by many blacks, seeing him as a race traitor. The main action takes place in the weeks leading up to the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King in 1968 and during the riots that follow it. Strange is a rookie cop feeling his way through the ethics and emotions of black-white relations. Hard Revolution is a wonderfully atmospheric, highly intelligent novel; and no one today — not even Elmore Leonard — writes better dialogue.

Boris Akunin, a best-selling writer in Russia, leapt into the English crime reader’s consciousness last year with The Winter Queen, which introduced us to the beguiling Moscow detective Erast Fandorin. In Leviathan (translated by Andrew Bromfield, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, £9.99; offer £8.49, p&p 99p; Buy the book), Fandorin plays a smaller, though crucial, role in a delightful and absurd tale of murder and chicanery set entirely on the world’s largest steamship, sailing between Egypt and India. The book is in a dangerous category, usually doomed to failure: the send-up of the whodunnit which is itself a very good whodunnit.

Akunin succeeds in both the humour and the mystery. It is 1878 and an English lord has been murdered in his Paris home, together with his nine servants. The only clue is a small golden whale left at the scene. Only 142 such whales exist — each given to a first-class passenger on the Leviathan. Therefore, deduces the investigating Commissioner Gauche — Inspector Clouseau meets Hercule Poirot — the whale-less traveller is the killer. He joins the voyage. Fandorin is on board too, plus an assorted bunch of eccentric suspects. Of course, there is further murder at sea. Satisfactory solutions are reached, only to be refuted moments later. Clever and fun.

Dacia Maraini’s collection of short stories, Darkness, (translated by Martha King, Steerforth Press, £13.99; offer £11.19, p&p £2.25) is based on newspaper cuttings of real Italian crimes, which the writer’s imagination transforms into a subtle and haunting examination of human weakness. Many of the stories are about sexual abuse against children — not the acts themselves but their cloudy, often ambiguous, background, the bits that don’t make the headlines.

Sister Attanasia is a novice nun made pregnant by rape; 12-year-Viollca has been sold into Italian prostitution by her Albanian parents so that they can pay for a new roof; a little boy has been talking about a pigeon man — his description becomes the clue when he is abducted. In the longest story, an 11-year-old boy accuses his father of raping him and his siblings; he is not believed. He returns year after year with the same allegations; then there’s a death.

Maraini asks poignantly: who tell more lies, children or adults? The stories don’t always reach a conclusion; many just seem to peter out. Maraini writes simply and matter-of-factly. That apparent lack of involvement makes the impact of her stories all the stronger.

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