THE OPENING SENTENCE is hard to beat: “On the same day Umberto Anastasia was killed in New York, a hippopotamus escaped from the zoo in Havana.”

The crucial link between the two events – the first of them real – is the basis of the Cuban-born Mayra Montero’s exuberant Dancing to Almendra (translated by Edith Grossman, Picador, £14.99/offer £13.49), an elegant story of crime and passion set mainly in 1957 Havana, when the city was the glamorous playground of movie stars and elite gangsters.

The narrators, Joaquin, an ambitious young journalist who stumbles on the connection between the hippo and the Mafia, and Yolande, his reminiscing one-armed lover, paint a vivid portrait of a louche, exciting underworld that was soon to disappear.

The acclaim for Peter Temple’s The Broken Shore last year has encouraged Quercus to issue two previous novels by the Australian writer. They did not disappoint. Bad Debts (£6.99/£6.64) is the first of four books featuring Jack Irish, a lawyer whose wife was killed by a client.

After a spell as a drunk, he turns private detective. He receives a message from another former client who has served time for causing death by dangerous driving. The frightened man wants to see Irish, but is gunned down outside the pub where they had arranged to meet. When he’s not at the race track, the emotionally troubled Irish delves doggedly, finding danger and violence.

An Iron Rose (£12.99/ £11.69) is not a Jack Irish book, but is full of the same Aussie vigour, colour and sharp dialogue. A former Melbourne cop turned country blacksmith doesn’t believe that his best friend, found hanged, has committed suicide. His inquiries rake up old skeletons – in both senses of the word.

Peter Robinson’s Piece of my Heart (Hodder, £6.99/ £6.64) is Inspector Alan Banks’s 16th appearance, and neither he nor his creator shows any signs of their powers waning. It’s a gripping tale of crimes from the past emerging to upset the present.

The past was the murder of a girl at a 1969 rock concert in Yorkshire, headlined by the legendary Mad Hatters; the reader is not told whether the case was solved. The second killing, 25 years later, is that of a freelance music journalist writing a biography of the long-disbanded group. Banks, his love life and job in turmoil, reopens the forgotten killing for clues to explain the hack’s demise. What fatal information had he discovered?

Equally blessed with long-term excellence is John Harvey, whose Darkness and Light (Arrow, £6.99/£6.64) concludes the trilogy featuring the retired Nottingham cop Frank Elder, as he is persuaded to look into one more mystery. A respectable woman’s body is found on her bed, her death apparently peaceful and her clothing respectfully arranged. But Elder recalls a murder identically posed from years before. The killer was never caught and the case was one of his greatest failures. This is a chance to redeem himself.

Suffer the Little Children (Heinemann, £15.99/£14.39) is Donna Leon at her best, deftly mixing Commissario Guido Brunetti’s detective work with perceptive awareness of social issues. The subject is baby trafficking, arising from a lack of children to satisfy the demand for adoption from Italy’s infertile couples. Why did police from Verona break into the apartment of a respectable Venetian paediatrician, injure him and take away his 18-month-old son?

Leon contrasts Brunetti’s happy family life (unusual in fictional coppery) with the desperation that causes upright couples to turn to vicious criminals and illegality. The city’s doctors and pharmacists are also involved. And there is Venice, which Leon describes with so much sad insight.

The most impressive recent debut was Brian McGilloway’s Borderlands (Macmillan New Writing, £12.99/£11.69) a tight, exquisitely written, atmospheric account of claustrophobic life around the border of Northern Ireland and the Republic. The body of a teenage girl from a dysfunctional local family is found in the no-man’s land where no one knows which police force has jurisdiction. Inspector Benedict Devlin, of the Garda, a man not without his own secrets, is a compelling investigator.

My anthology recommendation is the hugely enjoyable Dangerous Women (edited by Otto Penzler, Arrow, £8.99/ £8.09), 17 specially written short stories by some of the best writers around, including Ian Rankin, Jeffrey Deaver, John Connolly, Michael Connelly, Anne Perry, Laura Lippman and the late Ed McBain. Highlights for me were by Walter Mosley and Elmore Leonard. There were no lowlights.

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Celebrity choice: Susan Hill, novelist

THE TIGER IN THE SMOKE is Margery Allingham’s masterpiece. London atmosphere, fog, old houses, alleyways, darkened pubs and a terrifying villain – plus the enigmatic detective Albert Campion and a strange band of itinerant musicians. The stuff of nightmares.

Susan Hill’s The Risk of Darkness is now out in paperback (Vintage, £6.99)

Reader choice: In BE NEAR ME, sentence by beautiful sentence, Andrew O'Hagan builds his story of an unworldly priest's downfall in a bleak Scottish town with a profound and capturing eye for the truth. James Smith, London

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