THE WATER LEVEL OF AN Icelandic lake falls, to expose a half-buried skeleton weighed down by a radio transmitter bearing Russian writing. The bones must have lain there since the Cold War, when Soviet-bloc spies were active in the strategically important island.

A hole in the skull suggests murder, but who was the victim, who the killer, and why? The Draining Lake grips from the start, and confirms Arnaldur Indridason as preeminent among Nordic crime-writers. (Yes, including Henning Mankell.) The Reykjavik-based Inspector Erlendur is perhaps a mite too gloomy even by the standards of cold-climate detectives, and we are told too much about his druggy daughter, but he may have found a girlfriend and be lightening up.

His investigations into the lake skeleton lead back to a time when a group of ideologically committed students went to East Germany in a vain search for the socialist ideal. What happened affected them all, into the present. Erlendur sifts through the history of Iceland’s curious Cold War role and the emotions it engendered. The Draining Lake (translated by Bernard Scudder) is a beautiful, sad, haunting tale of lost love and lost illusion, regret and beytrayal.

In Val McDermid’s Beneath the Bleeding, Bradfield Victoria’s most famous footballing hero succumbs to ricin poisoning. Other prominent figures die, each by different obscure poisons. What is the motive that links them? Another storyline follows events leading up to a bomb during a match at the stadium. Many die. It has all the hall-marks of a terrorist attack, and the heavy-handed intelligence squad from London move in, elbowing the local police aside.

But the criminal profiler Tony Hill (in hospital after an axe attack) and his feisty collaborator and on/off love interest DCI Carol Jordan think otherwise, although they do not share a theory. But if not terrorism, what? Yet another intelligent and absorbing offering from one of crime fiction’s most consistent performers.

Rafael Reig’s manic inventiveness appears to know no bounds. He first came to the notice of British readers with the surrealist, absurdist comic mystery Blood on the Saddle ,in which his Madrid detective, Carlos Clot, was (among other madcap assignments) hired to trace a fictional heroine who had escaped from the novel she inhabited. In A Pretty Face(translated by Paul Hammond) Clot appears in a lesser part. The narrator, Lola Eguibar, a writer of children’s books, has been murdered, but does not know why.

She follows the incompetent police investigation with growing anger, but, being dead, cannot intervene; her sidekick is a precocious one-eyed teenager from her own books. There is no point trying to summarise an extravagant plot but Spain has become part of the US. Enjoy the humour and intellectual breadth.

The Draining Lake Harvill Secker, £11.99; 400pp

Buy the book here at the offer price of £10.79 (free p&p)

Beneath the Bleeding HarperCollins, £17.99; 000pp

Buy the book here at the offer price of £16.19 (free p&p)

A Pretty Face Serpent’s Tail, £8.99; 256pp

Buy the book here at the offer price of £8.54 (free p&p) 0870 1608080 timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst

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