The Chameleon’s Shadow by Minette Walters
Kennedy’s Brain by Henning Mankell
Bones to Ashes by Kathy Reichs
Heartsick by Chelsea Cain

MINETTE WALTERS is an adventurous novelist, who rarely repeats herself. Few crime writers have the courage to eschew the comfort of a regular detective. Her way is to alight upon a psychological issue and build a gripping crime tale around it.

In The Chameleon’s Shadow, her theme is the link between brain injury and personality change. Charles Acland sustains head injuries while serving in Iraq. His physical recovery is swift, except for a disfigurement. But how far has he recovered psychologically? He has become – or was he before? – rude, solitary, aggressive to women, suspicious, quick to take offence and quick to react violently.

The only person he appears to trust is a 250lb lesbian body-builder doctor. Could he be responsible for the murder of three homosexuals in Bermondsey? Walters leads us to the answer with her usual disturbing ability to look into damaged minds.

Kennedy’s Brain is not one of Henning Mankell’s Inspector Wallender novels. At one level it is a relatively straightforward mystery; but it is also an angry polemic on a subject that Mankell feels strongly about – the unnecessary suffering of Aids victims in Africa.

Louise Cantor, a Swedish archaeologist, finds her son Henrik dead in his flat, apparently by suicide. She cannot accept that and, in her grief, begins to investigate his death, discovering not only that he was HIV positive, but had had relationships she knew nothing about, leading secret lives in Barcelona and Mozambique (where Mankell lives for part of the year).

Cantor travels to Maputo, where the – often moving – Aids-related plot unravels and eventually yields a solution. Kennedy’s Brain (translated by Laurie Thompson) is a strangely uneven, but not negligible, novel which Mankell obviously felt that he needed to write.

In Bones to Ashes, Kathy Reichs’s spirited forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan (in her 10th novel) has a personal reason for being interested in the skeleton of a teenage girl, dead for many years.

She thinks that it might be Evangeline, her best friend from childhood, who suddenly disappeared. Her inquiries draw her into a pornography ring and the possibility of a killer still at large. Meanwhile, her love affair is breaking up. It’s much the same formula as almost all Reichs’s novels – old bones reveal old crimes, with dangerous present-day consequences – but she carries it off with panache and no signs of tiredness.

Chelsea Cain’s Heartsick has gathered much attention mainly because its serial killer, Gretchen Lowell, is advertised as being more evil than Hannibal Lecter. Perhaps so, but the reader has to travel through scenes of extreme cruelty and gruesomeness to find out.

Buy The Chameleon’s Shadow by Minette Walters
Macmillan, £17.99; 4000pp

Buy Kennedy’s Brain by Henning Mankell
Harvill Secker, £16.99; 336pp

Buy Bones to Ashes by Kathy Reichs
Heinemann, £18.99; 320pp

Buy Heartsick by Chelsea Cain
Macmillan, £10; 320pp

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