Once you’ve created Easy Rawlins, one of the most revered private eyes in crime fiction, it would normally be thought unwise to conjure up another big-city, ultra-streetwise black character plying the same trade. Comparisons would be inevitable. But Walter Mosley has disregarded the warnings and come up, in The Long Fall, with a terrific new hero.

Leonid McGill (named by his communist father after Brezhnev) is a New Yorker, a former boxer and tough underworld figure, who made the decision to go “from crooked to only slightly bent” by becoming a private investigator. He iss hired to trace the real names and whereabouts of four people known only by their long-ago teenage nicknames. He does so. One by one they start being bumped off, and his client has disappeared. There’s some good family stuff mixed in with the superior action; and McGill is unusual by insisting on remaining with a wayward wife who doesn’t love him, and three children, two of whom are the result of her adulterous affairs.

Michael Connelly’s The Scarecrow is a sort of sequel to his 1996 novel, The Poet. This time though — keeping up with real events — the journalist Jack McEvoy has just been sacked by the Los Angeles Times as part of its frantic economy drive. He has two weeks of employment left in which to unearth a scoop to make his employers regret getting rid of him. It comes when he looks into the vicious murder of a white stripper, for which a 16-year-old black youth has been charged. McEvoy believes he’s innocent. Then the ambitious young woman journo whom he’s supposed to be training to take over his job can’t be found. His inquiries lead him to a sinister high-technology security outfit. McEvoy is a sympathetic, obsessive loner hack, whose great love, first encountered in The Poet, returns, with dangerous consequences. Connelly has already proved, with his “Lincoln Lawyer” courtroom thrillers, that there is life after his hugely successful Harry Bosch LAPD cop series. With The Scarecrow he finds yet another kind of crime fiction in which to excel.

Instruments of Darkness is Imogen Robertson’s extremely impressive debut, a historical whodunnit that grew out of her winning a prize in a “best first thousand words” competition. The year is 1780. On her Sussex property, the sparky Harriet Westerman discovers the body of an unknown man, his throat cut. She goes for help to the reclusive, unfriendly occupant of a nearby house, Gabriel Crowther, who has spent much of his life studying the anatomies of murdered people. On the same day, in London, the violinist Alexander Adams is brutally slain by a mysterious elderly man. An aristocratic family link between the two killings emerges. Westerman and Crowther unravel a story, told by Robertson with great panache, of jealousy, conspiracies, greed and unkindness among the upper classes. She has a light touch and, best of all, does not burden the reader — as many historical crime writers tend to do — with a surfeit of dry research.

The Long Fall by Walter Mosley
Weidenfeld & Nicolson; 306pp Buy the book

The Scarecrow by Michael Connelly
Orion; 409pp Buy the book

Instruments of Darkness by Imogen Roberston
Headline; 376pp Buy the book

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