Iceland is famous for stunning scenery, collapsing banks and now a world-class crime writer called Arnaldur Indridason. His novels feature a detective who rivals Henning Mankell’s Inspector Wallander when it comes to gloomy introspection, but his plots and layering of past and present are hauntingly original. Arctic Chill (Harvill Secker £11.99, translated by Bernard Scudder and Victoria Cribb) confronts Inspector Erlendur with the murder of a child and chilling evidence of racism in Reykjavik’s apparently enlightened society.

The boy is 10, the son of a Thai woman and an Icelandic man. His body is discovered frozen to the ground outside a block of flats, lying in a pool of his own congealed blood; in a case that has echoes of the murder in south London of Damilola Taylor, the boy managed to stagger most of the way home before he collapsed. A teacher at his school is openly hostile to immigrants, and Erlendur’s attempts to find the killer are complicated by flashbacks from a tragic event in his own childhood. Arctic Chill is not an easy read but its humanity, insight and spare prose make it one of the most memorable crime novels of the year.

Anyone who has ever wondered why Inspector Wallander is quite so hangdog will find the answer in The Pyramid by Henning Mankell (Harvill Secker £17.99, translated by Ebba Segerberg with Laurie Thompson). The idea behind this collection of Wallander stories is brilliant but simple: it consists of Wallander’s earliest cases, beginning with a period in his life when he was still in uniform. The stories start with the apparent suicide of an elderly man and end with the brutal murders of two shopkeepers in Ystad, a case Wallander cracks after an unexpected dash to Egypt to get his cantankerous father out of trouble. As well as filling in gaps in Wallander’s biography, the book reveals Mankell’s sense that something has gone wrong in Sweden’s model social democracy and identifies some of the causes of the malaise.

Catherine Sampson is a former BBC journalist and Beijing correspondent of The Times. Her fourth novel, The Slaughter Pavilion (Macmillan £16.99), has an arresting opening: a man falls from the roof of a building in the business district of Beijing, leaving behind the frozen body of a child tied to an advertising hoarding. Sampson’s private eye, a former cop called Song, feels impelled to investigate because he ignored the man’s plea for help. He discovers that girls have been disappearing from a village in the north of China in what seems to be a trafficking operation. Sampson moves deftly through urban and rural locations, conveying the pervasive sense of being watched that means only the most desperate dare to challenge the lies of the state.

Aly Monroe is a newcomer to crime writing whose accomplished debut, The Maze of Cadiz (John Murray £16.99), is set in 1944. A British spy, Peter Cotton, is sent to Franco’s Spain to deal with an agent who is behaving erratically. After an unsettling visit to the British embassy in Madrid, Cotton arrives in Cadiz to find the man already dead and a web of shifting allegiances. As Franco begins to smell Hitler’s defeat, local dignitaries and ex- patriates are anxious not to be caught on the wrong side and they tease Cotton with perplex-ing snippets of information.

Monroe’s portrait of Cadiz in the aftermath of the civil war is atmospheric, and in a surprising twist the mild-mannered Cotton turns out to be as devious as his adversaries.

Blood Wedding (Constable £18.99) is another first novel, this time by a husband-and-wife team who use the pen name PJ Brooke. Set in Granada and the Sierra Nevada mountain range, the plot interweaves memories of the 1930s when the playwright Lorca was murdered — the novel’s title comes from one of his most famous works — with modern fears about Islamic terrorism. When a British Muslim girl dies in his home village, Sub-inspector Max Romero is called in to inv- estigate; the young woman has been researching Lorca’s death but suspicion quickly falls on a Muslim student, Hassan. An anti-terrorist unit arrives from Madrid, bungling a raid on an Islamic centre in a remote area of the mountains and leaving Romero with conflicting loyalties. The writing could on occasions be tighter, but this is a vivid novel that doesn’t shy away from police brutality or the ruthlessness of Islamic terrorism.

The Mind’s Eye by Hakan Nesser (Macmillan £16.99, translated by Laurie Thompson) is a psychological thriller in a class of its own. A Swedish teacher wakes up after a night of heavy drinking and discovers his wife’s murdered body in the bath. They have been married for only three months and he has no memory of killing her, or what might have motivated him. Inspector Van Veeteren has nagging doubts about the suspect’s guilt, but sees him convicted and locked up in a mental hospital. Only then does his memory begin to come back, confirming Van Veeteren’s suspicion that sinister events lie in the dead woman’s past. This stunning novel by one of Sweden’s foremost crime writers might have been written as a script for Alfred Hitchcock.

Finally, the Catalan novelist Teresa Solana has come up with a delightful mystery set in Barcelona. A Not So Perfect Crime (Bitter Lemon Press £8.99, translated by Peter Bush) features two incom-petent private detectives who aren’t what they seem: an elaborate door in their office is a fake, designed to persuade potential clients that the business is bigger than it is, and they’re also concealing the fact that they are brothers. Hired by a right-wing politician who suspects his wife is having an affair, the clueless duo stumble upon a naked woman who has fallen through a ceiling, and a murder involving poisoned sweets. Clever, funny and utterly unpretentious.

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