Unseen
by Mari Jungstedt
Doubleday, £10.99; 256pp

Hollywood Station
by Joseph Wambaugh
Quercus, £14.99; 304pp

Wash This Blood Clean From My Hand
by Fred Vargas
Harvill Secker, £11.99; 400pp

The Dinner Club
by Saskia Noort
Bitter Lemon, £9.99; 278pp

The Best American Mystery Stories
edited by Scott Turow
Quercus, £12.99; 3240pp

JUST WHEN I THOUGHT that the flow of impressive crime writers from the Nordic countries was slowing down, up pops another. Unseen (translated by Tiina Nunnally) is the Swede Mari Jungstedt’s first novel, but it doesn’t feel like it.

She is in total control of plot and pace, conveys chilling atmosphere and her characters are well above average for believability.

When a group of old friends meet for a party on the island of Gotland, one has a violent quarrel with her boy-friend. The following morning her viciously mutilated, naked body is found on the beach, next to her beheaded dog.

The boyfriend is taken into custody and Gotland prepares for the tourist season. Then the murder of another young woman in the same fashion tells Inspector Anders Knutas that a serial killer may be on the loose. Knutas and his tiny force look frantically for links between the two victims, while nervously awaiting a third. Their fears are fulfilled. Johan Berg, a television reporter, has a more personal reason for seeking a solution.

Joseph Wambaugh’s previous novel featuring the Los Angeles Police Department appeared in 1983. He has written much else since, but Hollywood Station returns to the LAPD in the format of the hard police procedural (as distinct from Ed McBain’s softer version) that he pioneered so successfully in the 1970s.

Wambaugh has lost none of his verve, humour or command of authentic dialogue. It is pointless to try to summarise the many complex, interlocking stories. Broadly, an eclectic assortment of cops, most of them dissatisfied with what has become of the LAPD, battles against an equally diverse collection of criminals, with violent, funny and moving results. Hugely enjoyable.

Despite its awful title, Wash This Blood Clean From My Hand, by Fred Vargas (translated from the French by Sian Reynolds) is riveting reading. We know from her previous novels that it doesn’t matter that Vargas’s plots are hardly believable and her characters rarely convincing.

Her Parisian cop, Commissaire Adamsberg, is weird, even occasionally deranged. He becomes convinced that a recent murder has been committed by a fearsome former judge, Fulgence, whom he holds responsible for at least eight killings, dating from the 1940s. Not only is the weapon the same — a trident, like Neptune’s — but in each case someone was framed, including Adamsberg’s brother.

None of the suspected killers could remember anything about the alleged crime. The problem with Adamsberg’s theory is that the judge died 16 years before the latest crime and even if he were alive, he would have been nearly 100 years old, too weak to have committed a physically demanding murder.

Adamsberg is in Quebec with a team of police to study new DNA methods. A young woman with whom he has a fling dies, stabbed by a trident. Adamsberg was near the scene at the time and is an obvious suspect. But he remembers nothing. Could he have been responsible? If it was not him, it must have been the long-dead judge.

Vargas breaks most of the rules of crime fiction, but writes novels that won’t let you go, disturb and linger long.

Dutch crime writers known to British readers are not thick on the ground. There was Janwillem van de Wetering. Full stop. (Nicholas Freeling, the creator of the Amsterdam cop Van der Valk, was English). So Saskia Noort might well become the second to intrude into our consciousness. In The Dinner Club (translated by Paul Vincent) a bestseller in the Netherlands, five bored and restless wives meet to exchange gossip and complaints. One of the husbands dies in a fire at his home; soon afterwards one of the wives falls from a hotel balcony. Are they suicides or murders? A tangled web of deceit, adultery and financial shenanigans emerges. The book is ambitiously described as “Desperate Housewives scripted by Patricia Highsmith”. The first part is vaguely accurate.

The 2006 edition of The Best American Mystery Stories (edited by Scott Turow) contains 21 shorts from the 1,500 published in the US. It includes offerings by Elmore Leonard, James Lee Burke, Walter Mosley, Joyce Carol Oates and Jeffrey Deaver, and some names less familiar to British readers. All are of a high standard that proves that the crime short story is far from dead.

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