Blind Eye written and read by Stuart MacBride
There’s an edge of abrasive comedy even among the most hideous episodes of violence and brutality in this Aberdeen-based police procedural. Unlovely new architecture has “all the charm of a kick in the bollocks”; a young prostitute’s hair is “like deep-fried string”. There’s also a running joke of dubious taste about an inventively foul-mouthed lesbian detective who is determined to wrest a sperm donation from the book’s maverick hero, Detective Sergeant Logan McRae, so her girlfriend can have a baby. The plot involves nasty goings-on among the city’s Polish community, a trail of vengeance and violence that takes McRae all the way to Krakow. This detour, involving a blind clockmaker and a lot of explosives, seems otiose given the amount of colourful criminal mayhem that the drug gangs, pornographers, bent coppers and paedophiles of MacBride’s Aberdeen can provide. The author reads with relish, and it’s fast and funny, if you can stand the blood and guts (Harper £15, 13 hours unabridged)

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The Complaints by Ian Rankin read by Peter Forbes
Malcolm Fox (dry alcoholic, divorced, lives in a “bachelor beige” bungalow) is a policeman whose unpopular job it is to investigate his colleagues’ misdeeds. His dad is in a home, his sister’s boyfriend is knocking her about. Hardly exciting, actually a bit depressing, which makes Fox a bit of a gamble by Rankin, but before you wonder where the inventor of boozy, mouthy Rebus is going with his new hero, it quickly gets complicated, murky and, at times, hard to follow. We’re in recession-hit 2009 Edinburgh, and the travails of a property developer in serious financial deficit to some very nasty people become central to the unravelling of several mysteries, not least of which is who wants to discredit Fox. He’s not the only new character Rankin has introduced to Edinburgh’s police force, teaming up with the thoroughly modern detective Jamie Breck — posh, ambitious, online gamer — in a partnership that begins in a grippingly tense cat-and-mouse standoff. (Whole Story £24.46, 12 hrs 25 mins, unabridged)

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