OLD HEROES NEVER DIE, they just linger on the edges of the imagination, haunting their creators until it’s time to stage a comeback, sometimes when all else has failed.

In the cases of Martin Cruz Smith and Philip Kerr it’s not that all else has failed, but that nothing else has been quite as successful as the characters that made their reputations.

Arkady Renko and Bernie Gunther could be mirror images: hard-nosed, sharp-talk-ing, street-savvy cops struggling under dictatorship and its chaotic aftermath – in the former Soviet Union and now Russia, and in Weimar, Nazi and now postwar Germany.

Renko has not aged as much as he should have done since Gorky Park came out a quarter of a century ago, but in Stalin's Ghost (Macmillan, £17.99/offer £16.19) he is on top form, surviving beatings and a bullet to the head as he grapples with corruption, cover-ups in Chechnya and atrocities unearthed, literally, from 60 years earlier.

In The One from the Other (Quercus, £12.99/£11.69) it is 1949 and Gunther, recently widowed and now hoary-hea-ed, is trying to rebuild his private detective business in Munich where clients as well as the criminals have much to conceal about their past.

This is an apparently meandering, but actually cogently plotted odyssey through the world of former SS men (including Gunther himself), tainted medical research and the dirty realities of the postwar world, told in suitably Chandleresque narration. Cracking stuff, both of them.

Deon Meyer’s hero Bennie Griessel is a hard-drinking detective cut from the same cloth, in the not wholly dissimilar political landscape of modern South Africa. In Devil’s Peak (Hodder, £14.99/ £13.49) both sides of post-apartheid society grate painfully against each other.

The Afrikaner Griessel must track down a vigilante killer of child abusers who turns out to be a former ANC freedom fighter avenging the death of his son. No so much a tale of black and white as black and blue, and bleeding.

The world’s most intractable conflict, between the Israelis and Palestinians, is the backdrop to a courtoom murder trial in Richard North Patterson’s incisive and authoritatively researched Exile (Macmillan, £12.99/£11.69). This is gripping but explains fairly and passionately both sides of a nightmare from which neither party seems able to wake.

John le Carré continues to display effortless mastery not just of his art but of the complexities of the postCold War world in The Mission Song (Hodder, £6.99/£6.29 paperback, out early next month), a compelling story of cynical Western exploitation in Africa. The narrator is an interpreter who has dragged himself from a childhood in jungle mission schools to life on the London media circuit, until his skills get him drafted into a shady mercenary operation that brings back horrors he thought he had escaped.

The Ruins (Corgi, £6.99/ £6.64) is by the American phenomenon Scott Smith, who has published nothing since the runaway success of his gripping debut A Simple Plan more than ten years ago. His comeback should send a chill down the spine of anyone sweltering on a Yucatan beach.

A group of US college kids leave their sunbeds for an excursion into the jungle to find a friend on an archaeological dig at a Mayan village. They soon find out why he hasn’t returned and why the local Indians initially won’t let them near, then won’t let them leave. The lurking evil starts to pick them off – one by one. An old formula, but it works.

Another old formula that never fails is the hero on the run from faceless killers. Simon Kernick’s Relentless (Corgi, £6.99/£6.64) originated in a nightmare in which the author picked up the phone to hear an old friend being murdered. His last words before an agonising demise were the author’s address. Only one thing to do – run! Which is what the hero of Kernick’s novel does, starting a high-octane chase that drags terror through the lace curtains of Home Counties suburbia.

Andrew Wilson’s debut manages equally to inject the mundane with a lethal dose of macabre. The Lying Tongue (Canongate, £10.99/ £10.44) contrasts a dreary Dorset public school and dank North London with the crumbling exotica of Venice.

Adam Wood is employed as a secretary and factotum to an ageing reclusive gay writer who appears to have a dark secret in his past. Adam, who is as exploitative as his employer, goes digging dangerously but is no more prepared for what he finds than the reader is for the tail-twisting trickery of the immensely satisfying ending. Don’t look now!

Buy the books here

Celebrity choice: Dean Koontz, thriller writer

I recently reread Alistair MacLean’s WHERE EAGLES DARE and THE GUNS OF NAVARONE. I had read them in my youth and wanted to see if they still stood up. They did. They seek to be nothing more than exciting thrillers and they suceed in that. Sometimes unambitious fiction succceeds where ambitious fiction fails.

Dean Koontz’s latest novel The Good Guy is published by HarperCollins at £17.99

Reader choice: I'm reading POMPEII by Robert Harris - because I'm going there on the train. Nichola Waddicor, Cirencester

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