The Père-Lachaise Mystery by Claude Izner

The Officer's Prey by Armand Cabasson

Paris Noir edited by Maxim Jabukowski

The Commission by Michael Norman

Gallic Books was set up to bring to British readers contemporary French novels, mainly crime. Both its latest offerings are set in the 19th century but I hope that future publications will include more modern settings.

The Père-Lachaise Mystery (translated by Lorenza Garcia and Isabel Reid) is the second book by Claude Izner (actually two sisters) to feature the antiquarian bookseller and sleuth Victor Legris. It is 1890. Odette de Valois, once Legris's mistress, visits her husband's grave in the Paris cemetery and is never seen again. Her maid seeks Legris' help, and is then murdered. Legris wafts through fin-de-siècle Paris, inquiring suavely.

Armand Cabasson's The Officer's Prey (translated by Michael Glencross) is set within Napoleon's doomed invasion of Russia in 1812. The French Army stops in a small Polish town, where a young woman is murdered in her bedroom. The killer must have been a senior officer – because a sergeant was seen standing to attention and saluting him.

Quentin Margont, a dashing captain, reduces the several hundred suspects to four colonels, and as he gets closer to the solution — and Napoleon's Army retreats — his own life is in danger.

Paris Noir, edited by Maxim Jakubowski, collects 18 short stories, by British, American and French writers, exposing the sinister side of the capital. It is recommended, even if a couple of the stories lack convincing ambience.

Michael Norman was a police officer and a member of the Utah parole board, so one gets verisimilitude. Sam Kincaid, hero of The Commission, heads the special investigations branch of the Utah Department of Corrections. The chairman of the parole board is shot dead on returning from an extramarital assignation. A violent former prisoner is soon fingered, but when Kincaid goes to arrest him, he too is dead and a complex conspiracy within the criminal justice system emerges. A no-frills police procedural, none the worse for its lack of fashionable violence

The Père-Lachaise Mystery by Claude Izner

Gallic Books, £7.99; 303pp

The Officer's Prey by Armand Cabasson

Gallic Books, £7.99; 416pp

Paris Noir edited by Maxim Jabukowski

Serpent's Tail, £8.99; 332pp

The Commission by Michael Norman

Poisoned Pen, £9.95; 236pp

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