Doors Open by Ian Rankin
Orion, £18.99; 272pp Buy the book

Swan Peak by James Lee Burke
Orion, £14.99; 416pp Buy the book

A Darker Domain by Val McDermid
HarperCollins, £18.99; 384pp Buy the book

Devil Bones by Kathy Reichs
Heinemann, £18.99; 320pp Buy the book

SO HOW would Ian Rankin open his post-Rebus career? We've known for some time that the first book of the rest of his life was entitled Doors Open and that it was about a heist in Edinburgh. Readers of The New York Times last year would know more because the newspaper serialised a much shorter version of it, though with all the essentials present. But how good is it? Will Rebus fans be satisfied?

Doors Open follows the well-trodden formula of a heist novel. The amateur plotters are a bored ex-businessman millionaire, a banker, an eminent art professor and an artist brilliant at faking famous works; they're helped by an unreliable gang leader. Their audacious plan (the adjective is compulsory when describing heist plots) is to steal several paintings from the National Gallery of Scotland. Things go wrong, of course, the conspirators aren't all that efficient, people can't keep secrets, and the police suspect that something's afoot. In the end they either get away with it or not; I won't say which.

Doors Open is a lot of fun. It's pacy, witty, full of action, twists and splendid dialogue. And Rebus does make a subtle appearance when an officer describes his police station as “a damn sight quieter since you-know-who retired”.

James Lee Burke's latest, Swan Peak, is initially disconcerting. It doesn't take place in Louisiana, where David Robicheaux, the tough 'tec with the troubled soul, has his home and his adventures. It is usually unwise for a writer of crime fiction to take a well-loved character out of his natural habitat. Burke has another problem. His last Robicheaux novel, The Tin Roof Blowdown, set in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, was of such powerful elegance that any follow-up was bound to suffer by comparison; and Swan Peak does.

The temporary removal of Robicheaux and his irrespon-sible friend Clete Purcel to the open spaces of Montana doesn't quite satisfy. They are there on holiday, but crime and their past have followed them. A college student is found brutally executed near the house where Robicheaux is staying; his girlfriend's body lies not far away, raped and murdered. The same killer disposes of another young couple. Purcel, fishing alone, comes across thugs he'd encountered years ago; they now work for an evil local landowner. There are several sub-plots and references to events back in Louisiana. Burke is incapable of writing less than beautifully, but Swan Peak is too crammed and complex to be a total success.

In A Darker Domain, Val McDermid weaves a superb mystery around the miners' strike of 1984. A woman walks into a police station in Fife to report a missing person, her father. Only, he's been missing for 22 years. His family hadn't reported his disappearance because they believed he'd left the Fife coalfields during the strike to join the scab strike-breakers in Nottingham.

McDermid is particularly convincing in portraying the emotions engendered by the strike, no doubt a consequence of her own upbringing in a Fife mining community.

Detective Inspector Karen Pirie, a self-proclaimed “wee fat woman”, in charge of cold cases, starts inquiring. She is also investigating the kidnapping of a woman from the same period. A botched ransom handover resulted in the woman's death, but the kidnappers had escaped with her baby son. Now, a journalist visiting Tuscany has stumbled across a poster identical to one that had contained the ransom demand. McDermid moves cleverly between Pirie's two inquiries and between 1984-85 and 2007. An absorbing novel, one of her best.

In Devil Bones, Kathy Reich's latest, the forensic anthropologist Dr Tempe Brennan analyses gruesome, scary finds connected with voodoo-type ceremonies. She enters the dangerous world of devil-worship, where there are killings galore and plenty of excitement. Reich conveys her bones expertise with her usual clarity, but Brennan herself is becoming a little boring.

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