Skin by Mo Hayder
Bantam, £14.99, 382 pp. Buy the book

Back to the Coast by Saskia Noort, translated by Laura Vroomen
Bitter Lemon, £8.99, 235 pp. Buy the book

Dark Times in the City by Gene Kerrigan
Harvill Secker £11.99, 304 pp. Buy the book

All the Dead Voices by Declan Hughes
John Murray, £16.99, 308 pp. Buy the book

If you've read Mo Hayder before, the title of her latest novel will scare you - and rightly. Human and animal bodies, minus their skin, are central to the story and, as usual, Hayder does not stint in describing gory details.

Skin is the fourth novel to feature DI Jack Caffery, the second since he moved from London to join the Major Crime Investigation Unit in Bristol. A young woman's decomposing corpse is found, seemingly a suicide; a famous footballer's wife goes missing. Sergeant Phoebe “Flea” Marley, a police diver, discovers a body that threatens her own precarious stability.

Hayder is not a subdued writer. Her characters are almost as chilling as the horrors that they are investigating. The inner demons of Caffery and Marley make the turmoils of Rankin's Rebus or Mankell's Wallender seem puny and adolescent.

But her exaggerations - of people and of shocking events - succeed because she writes and plots with such panache and reins in her excesses before they become totally absurd. Macabre, yes, but also absorbing and hugely entertaining.

Saskia Noort, the Netherlands' most famous crime writer, is known to the British reader for her excellent second novel, The Dinner Club; but her first, Back to the Coast, is only now available in English. In it she demonstrates a control of mood and tension not usually found in debutants. The highly strung Maria, a mediocre singer with a pop group and an anxious mother of two, falls pregnant and decides that she cannot cope with a third child. Her abortion sets off a series of threatening letters and frightening events, which do not stop when she flees to stay with her sister in what was their old, unhappy family home. No one, police included, believes her story; she starts having doubts herself. Who is responsible, and why? It's a much-used formula but Noort handles it with confidence.

Coincidentally, two Dublin-based novels, published at the same time, contain equally appealing principal characters and cover much the same territory - the capital's underworld. In Gene Kerrigan's Dark Times in the City, Danny Callaghan, a louche ex-criminal going straight, is drinking in a Dublin pub when two gunmen come in to kill a small-time crook; Callaghan, for no particular reason, prevents them from doing so, which attracts the ire of the godfather who sent in the hitmen and reluctantly involves our non-hero in gangland activities. Elsewhere in Dublin, in Declan Hughes's All the Dead Voices, the dashing, troubled private eye Ed Loy is hired by the daughter of the victim of an unsolved murder to work out which of three suspects committed the crime. Against him are villains, cops with something to hide and remnants of the IRA. Kerrigan and Hughes share muscular writing, a smart line in self-deprecating humour, terrific dialogue and an engrossing portrayal of the sights and sounds of Dublin Noir.

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