IN GILBERT ADAIR'S SECOND delightful, fluffy pastiche-homage to Agatha Christie, A Mysterious Affair of Style (Faber, £12.99/offer £11.69) the eccentric Evadne Mount, mystery writer and occasional sleuth, teams up again with the doleful, now retired, Trubshawe of the Yard to investigate a brace of murders in the film milieu. A fire has consumed a flamboyant director; poisoned champagne has accounted for a fading actress. Suspects with motives had no opportunity, and vice versa. Adair, knowledgeable about films and whodunnits, flourishes an array of in-jokes and comic situations from both sectors. There's a decent plot too.

The King of Lies (St Martin's Minotaur, £6.99/£6.64), by John Hart, was one of the most impressive debuts of the year. “Work” Pickens, an insignificant and unhappy lawyer from a dysfunctional family in a suffocating North Carolina community, is suspected of killing his father. The old man — a ruthless tyrant, hated by many — has been missing for 18 months, since the night his wife died falling downstairs. His body has now been found, full of bullet holes. Trying to exculpate himself, Pickens digs deep into his own psyche and uncovers dark secrets about his townsfolk.

Hart's follow-up Down River (John Murray, £11.99/£10.79) (they were published in Britain within a few months of each other) is equally atmospheric of claustrophobic small-town America. Adam Chase has fled to New York after being acquitted of a murder which almost everyone, including most of his family, believes he committed. He returns five years later to help an old friend in trouble, and is enmeshed in old jealousies, loves and conflicts, and more killing.

You do not have to be a poker aficionado to have fun with Dead Man's Hand, edited by Otto Penzler, (Quercus, £14.99/£13.49), a collection of crime stories connected with the game. Contributors include Walter Mosley, Alexander McCall Smith, Michael Connelly, Jeffrey Deaver, Peter Robinson and Joyce Carol Oates, so you get some excellent crimewriting, irrespective of the theme. But crime and poker — whether part of the gambling industry or as a trigger for heightened personal emotions — are happy bedfellows.

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Britain's best-loved personalities tell the Times what they will be reading at Christmas

Background

• The Times Christmas choice: fiction

• The Times Christmas choice: crime

• The Times Christmas choice: history

• The Times Christmas choice: audiobooks

Background

• The Times Christmas choice: children aged 2-10

• The Times Christmas choice: gardening

• The Times Christmas choice: art

• The Times Christmas choice: memoirs and autobiographies

• The Times Christmas choice: graphic novels

Four of my recommendations are by Scottish authors. This may be pure coincidence, or an indication that Scotland has become the new Sweden in crime fiction terms. Ian Rankin's Exit Music (Orion, £18.99/ £17.09) is the 17th and supposedly the final appearance of Inspector John Rebus. It starts when a dissident Russian poet is found dead in an Edinburgh car park, apparently the victim of a mugging gone wrong. But it's not the plot that matters this time, good though it is, but Exit Music's status as a fitting finale for a much loved cop.

If anyone can inherit Rankin's mantle as No1 Scottish crime writer, Denise Mina deserves to, even though she doesn't have a conventional detective figure and will never sell as many books. Her heroine is a fat and feisty, emotionally awry Glasgow journalist, Paddy Meehan. In The Last Breath (Bantam, £12.99/ £11.69), set in 1990, she suspects that her friend and former lover has been killed by the IRA, but no one believes her. The dialogue zings with wit and authenticity, and her characterisation is well above average.

The Death List (Mira, £6.99/ £6.64), by Paul Johnston (another Scot, though it is set in London) is at the scary end of Christmas reading — read only when others are around. Matt Wells, a crime writer on his uppers, dumped by wife, agent and publisher, is contacted by an admirer who turns out to be a psychopath killer, calling himself WD, for White Devil. WD kills those who have wronged him using methods devised by Wells in his novels. Then he turns to bumping off people who have been unkind to Wells himself. As WD's attention comes closer, Wells must seek him out. It's over the top, but Johnston writes with horrifying power.

A little less macabre is Absolution (Michael Joseph, £12.99/£11.69), Caro Ramsey's confident first novel. The Crucifixion Killer is so called because he cuts open his victims and leaves them to die with their arms outstretched. DCI Alan McAlpine's investigation reawakens traumatic memories of a beautiful mysterious woman who died 20 years ago after an acid attack. As his morbid inquiries continue, his psychological stability declines.

Bestsellers 2007

1 The Interpretation of Murder by Jed Rubenfeld
Headline Review, £7.99
Sigmund Freud gets mixed up with a sex killer on his only visit to US.

2 The Savage Garden by Mark Mills
Harper, £7.99

3 Break No Bones by Kathy Reichs
Arrow, £6.99

4 The Tenderness of Wolves by Stef Penney
Quercus, £7.99

5 The Naming of the Dead by Ian Rankin
Orion, £6.99

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