The Bullet Trick (Canongate £12.99) is Louise Welsh’s follow-up to her much admired The Cutting Room, and nods to Poe in the name of her penurious magician, William Wilson. Whether in Glasgow, London or Berlin, Wilson is dogged by death: the owner of a Soho club where he performs at a top cop’s retirement party is killed, and a William Tell-style trick involving a gun and a pretty girl goes horribly wrong during his spell in Germany. Welsh puts in just enough illicit activity to justify her placing on these pages, but her real interest is clearly in describing Wilson’s tricks and backstage life in dingy clubs, which she does brilliantly.

Myron Bolitar makes his first appearance in a Harlan Coben novel for six years in Promise Me (Orion £14.99), and at once gets into a scrape after offering to help Aimee, the teenage daughter of a couple he knows, if she ever gets into trouble — without asking questions or telling her parents. She duly calls him at 2am one morning, and he drives her to the house where she wants to go. When it becomes clear the next day that Aimee has vanished and that he was the last person to see her, he promises his now somewhat frosty friends to find out what happened. Slickly plotted, the story ends with a trademark twist.

Artie Cohen, Reggie Nadelson’s Russian-American detective, reappears in Fresh Kills (Heinemann £16.99), in which his 14-year-old nephew Billy, convicted of stabbing a man to death, is in New York on temporary release from a therapeutic facility in Florida. As Cohen takes the teenager around with him, views differ: is Billy now cured, as Artie hopes? Or should he be locked up for ever, as his victim’s family believe? It is an issue that eventually becomes compelling, but too little happens in the first half of a novel that initially seems unsure what genre — social comedy? 9/ll meditation? psychological thriller? — it belongs to.

Terrorism is the central theme of Robert Wilson’s The Hidden Assassins (HarperCollins £14.99), which continues his series featuring Seville homicide detective Javier Falcon. An apartment building with a mosque in the basement is wrecked by an explosion, and Falcon’s investigation leads to the realisation that a potentially more destructive attack is being planned. This is a lengthy, complicated novel, not least because Wilson also weaves in lurid personal crises for the series’ other recurring characters. It’s hard to see why: his expertly developed thriller plot would arguably work better if not continually punctuated by these disconnected soapy storylines.

Denise Mina gives a second outing to Paddy Meehan in The Dead Hour (Bantam £12.99), which finds the young reporter regularly driving around night-time Glasgow in search of newsworthy crimes. One case comes to grip her: she watches two policemen take no action against a man although the woman with him has clearly been beaten, then learns the following day that the same woman was later murdered. Angry but also sensing that this could make her career, she conducts her own investigation. This author’s forte is atmosphere: rather as Ian Rankin does with Edinburgh, Meehan offers an alternative tour of the city, taking in its housing estates, A&E wards and police stations as well as its plush suburbs.

A Tale Etched in Blood and Hard Black Pencil (Little, Brown £14.99) opens with the present-day discovery of two partially burnt dead bodies. But most of Christopher Brookmyre’s novel unfolds in flashback, in the classrooms and playgrounds shared not only by one of the victims and both the main suspects, but also their lawyer and the detective handling the case. And the crime plot, though serviceable, is essentially a pretext for this portrayal of Scottish schools in the 1970s and 1980s, stretching all the way from the group’s first day as primary pupils to a party when they’re 16. Both childhood and the era are sharply evoked in a novel that’s often extremely funny — don’t overlook the enjoyably spiky concluding glossary.

In Little Face (Hodder £18.99), the debut “psychological crime novel” by the poet Sophie Hannah, Alice Fancourt is convinced her baby daughter Florence has been replaced by another child, probably by a kidnapper. Her husband and mother-in-law think she’s gone mad, and when she disappears with the putative replacement see that as proof that they’re right. She also finds it hard to persuade the police to take her claim seriously, with a sympathetic male detective offset by a female sergeant who scornfully accuses him of wasting his time on Alice’s fantasies because he’s attracted to her. Hannah adapts to crime fiction with arresting aplomb: her characters are vivid, the novel’s challenging double narrative is handled with flair, and its denouement (though raising a question or two about authorial fair play) is ingenious.

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