END GAMES by Michael Dibdin

ABSOLUTION by Caro Ramsay

DIE WITH ME by Elana Forbes

REASONABLE DOUBTS by Gianrico Carofiglio

SADLY, MICHAEL Dibdin’s last novel, End Games, published posthumously, is Inspector Zen’s eleventh and final appearance.

There is little in it to suggest that Dibdin intended it as his goodbye. On the contrary, End Games shows the author and his great creation – one of the most memorable in crime fiction – in fine, combative form, only mildly contemplating the life hereafter.

Zen is in Calabria, the remote toe of Italy, a region full of suspicions, ancient family feuds and a tomato-based cuisine not to the detective’s liking. Into this unfriendly land arrive symbols of American greed and insensitivity, ostensibly connected with making a movie, but with a even more profitable, secret, agenda. One of them, an American lawyer, has dark, unexplained roots in the territory. Deaths ensue. Zen investigates with his inimitable mixture of world-weary insouciance piercing insights into human souls, cunning, dodgy police tactics, and insubordinate behaviour. It may not have been meant as Aurelio Zen’s farewell, but End Games is a pretty good way to finish.

Caro Ramsay is another Scottish writer to be saddled with comparison with Ian Rankin. Forget about it. Enjoy Absolution for what it is – a cracker of a debut. In 1984 the young Glasgow cop Alan McAlpine is deeply affected by sitting at the bedside of a once beautiful woman, the victim of an acid attack that destroyed her face. More than 20 years later DCI McAlpine is hunting the “Crucifixion Killer”, so named after the macabre positions in which he arranges his women victims. McAlpine’s inquiries awaken memories and threaten his marriage, mental stability and career. Many shivers in store for readers, followed by a shattering climax.

Elana Forbes is also an impressive first-timer. Die With Me opens chillingly. A lonely, impressionable schoolgirl has been persuaded over the internet to meet a man at an obscure church in West London, where they will consummate their everlasting love by committing suicide together. Instead, he throws her to her death over the church balcony. It turns out that other depressed young women suffered the same fate.

The killer’s e-mails are untraceable; the women had nothing in common other than their victimhood. Forbes is good on plot, tension and lurking evil. The killer is clever and frighteningly normal but the slightly insipid police need a bit of livening up.

The role of the Bari-based lawyer Guido Guerrieri is to take on impossible cases that have little chance of success. In Reasonable Doubts, by Gianrico Carofiglio, translated by Howard Curtis, his client is appealing against his conviction and lengthy sentence for drug smuggling; he’s also a former neo-fascist thug who had once beaten up Guerrieri. The lawyer accepts the case only because he’s fallen in lust with the prisoner’s wife; his efforts to prove his client’s innocence bring him into dangerous conflict with Mafia interests. Everything a legal thriller should be.

End Games by Michael Dibdin

Faber, £12.99; 356pp

Buy the book here at the offer price of £11.69 (free p&p)

Absolution by Caro Ramsay

Michael Joseph, £12.99; 416pp

Buy the book here at the offer price of£11.69 (free p&p)

Die With Me by Elana Forbes

Quercus, £12.99; 352pp

Buy the book here at the offer price of £11.69 (free p&p)

Reasonable Doubts by Gianrico Carofiglio

Bitter Lemon Press, £8.99; 275pp

Buy the book here at the offer price of £8.54

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