Friends draw attention to the problems of repeated devices that lost their appeal in series writing, Jan Lawrie mentioning this with Tim Sullivan’s autistic detective and Paul Griew with C.J. Sansom’s Shardlake. I have found it a real problem with Sara Paretsky’s V.I. Warshawski. Yet, for other authors, the system appears to work. Interesting to consider the contrast.

A superbly-plotted novel set in north Devon with graduates of Exeter deeply involved, what is there not to like about Nick Louth’s The Two Deaths of Ruth Lyle (Canelo, 2024, £9.99), which adopts, as a successful plot device, an issue I predicted earlier in this series. Devon emerges not as quaint, Dartmoor-Gothic, nor rural-Aga-inconvenience, but as the drabness of north Devon, in this case Ilfracombe. I have already praised Louth’s Body in Nightingale Park in his Craig Gillard series. This new novel launches Jan Talantire, a successful detective creation, with a story beginning with the elderly Ruth Lyle, impaled by a crucifix, at the spot where a Ruth Lyle was thus killed a half-century earlier. Psychological, plot-twister, with lots of interesting characters, police system under pressure, political corruption. Lots going for this excellent novel.

Ending as the wonderfully Gothic story it is working toward throughout, Lily Samson’s debut The Switch (Century, 2024, £14.99) is a triumph. The plot has as many twists as you might expect when you start with two women plotting to trick their partners in a sex game, and the proverbial ‘nothing is what you might expect’ comes to the fore. Plot, characterisation, settings, dialogue, and frissons all work. Modern Gothic.

Not all debut novels, alas, work. There are many good murder stories set in India, but Ram Murali’s Death in the Air (Atlantic, 2024, £16.99) is not one of them. The book begins badly with Bermuda and London sections that are tediously mannered and a plonking obsession with clothes as in ‘His light blue button-down shirt was tucked into pale yellow trousers. The sleeves of his shirt were rolled up, revealing tanned forearms.’ References to Christie are inappropriate, doubly so as revealing how much Murali does not make the grade. Best avoided.

Instead, try (and Murali would benefit very greatly from considering) the shortlist for the Bloody Scotland Debut Prize from the Bloody Scotland International Crime Writing Festival, Martin Stewart’s Double Proof (Polygon, 2024, £9.99), Daniel Aubrey’s Dark Island (HarperNorth, 2024, £9.99), Allan Gaw’s The Silent House of Sleep (SA Press), Suzy Aspley’s Crow Moon (Orenda, 2024, £9.99), and Doug Sinclair’s Blood Runs Deep (Storm Publishing). Stewart’s novel is at once dark and witty, a caustic look at Scottish life, privileged and not, and at whisky-worship, in which a down-and-out author who helped solve one kidnapping is called on for another in Glasgow. Gangland rivalries, Japanese role, drugs, fraud, and violence. Mordaunt style, and a welcome crispness of prose. Crow Moon lacks this wit and instead focuses on the paranoia of winter darkness in a remote village. Dark Island takes us to Orkney. Remoteness in a different fashion is the theme of Aubrey’s novel, with Orkney no Arcadia. Freya Sinclair, a journalist newly-arrived from Glasgow with a difficult back-story and an all-too-present autism investigates the storm-caused exhumation of human remains to find a web of conspiracy that leads to the heart of the Orcadian establishment. Well-written, convincing characters, and a real page-turner. Not got the wit of Martin Stewart’s novel, but the bleakness is well-suited to setting and subject.

John Franklin Bardin’s The Deadly Percheron (1946; Penguin, 2024, £9.99) is one of a 30 volume new series on Crime and Espionage published by Penguin. It includes familiar authors, with three Simenons, three Le Carré’s, a Fleming, two Amblers, two Teys, a Himes, and a Chandler, as well as those that may be less well known. The production values are good, as is the pricing, although, unlike with the British Library Crime Classics, there is no introduction. Penguin are to be congratulated on what so far is an excellent initiative. I did not know this Bardin. It is a complex and impressive tale about a New York psychiatrist plunged into identity-theft (his own), murder, and a richly, textured account of living nightmare, inheritance pursuit, and the underworld of the Big Apple psyche. Well worth reading.

Chris Brookmyre’s The Cracked Mirror (Abacus, 2024) brings together two very different detectives, a Scottish Miss Marple character and a LAPD detective in order to confront a plot launched with a strangulation in a Perthshire confessional. The death of his number 2 and the pursuit of a suspect leads the LAPD detective to Perthshire where a wedding reveals the dysfunctional nature of the arrogant social élite. Goes with a great pace and the variety in tones works for me.

John Bude’s A Telegram From Le Touquet (1956; 2024, British Library Crime Classics, £9.99), is very good, and better than the several others in the series which first republished his work in 2014 with the somewhat worthy The Lake District Murder (1935) and also The Cornish Coast Murder (1935). The Telegram is a novel of two unequal parts, the shorter first, a country house party at the Kent home of the wealthy Gwenny Marrable, introducing all the characters, and a longer second set in and near Villa Paradou on the Côte d’Azur after a body is discovered there, with the heat almost palpable and the principal detective, Inspector Blampignon, perspiring most of the time. He is also wreathed in cigarette smoke, as indeed are other characters. A well-constructed story that has a fine feel for place and with an impressive resolve.

Before the Fact (1932; British Library Crime Classics, 2024, £9.99) by Anthony Berkeley Cox, writing as Francis Iles, was the basis for Alfred Hitchcock’s film Suspicion (1941), and is a welcome sequel in the series to his excellent and witty The Poisoned Chocolates Case, Jumping Jenny and Murder in the Basement, while, under his Iles’ pseudonym, this was a sequel to his Malice Aforethought (1931), a successful story from the perspective of a murderer and one focusing on psychological drive. In Before the Fact, it is a victim who provides the perspective. The tone is repeatedly sardonic as in ‘Having lived all her life in the country, where people do not talk about these things, when had never realised that the percentage of happy marriages among the population of Great Britain is probably something under .0001.’ Highly impressive as psychology. Not for those seeking a relaxing read.

Joanna Wallace’s second novel, The Dead Friend Project (Viper, 2024, £16.99), is a well-written, ably-plotted account of a group of school mum ‘friends’ one of whose number dies on an evening jog, hit by a car. The cause of the ‘jog’ becomes the mystery, and, in particular, whether she is fleeing someone, as is reported at the outset, and, if so, who and why. Some brilliantly unkind writing, and lots of put downs: ‘Less Sweaty Betty chic. More … sweaty.’ Starts of slow but gathers pace, and works well as a novel, and fairly well as a mystery.

‘When Lesley met her, Allegra had been a reality TV producer. But it turned out she didn’t really like reality after all, and she quit her job soon after they married. She said at the time that working didn’t suit the flow she wanted in her life.’ Megan Davis’s second novel, Bay of Thieves (Zaffre, 2024, £16.99), a thriller set in international fraud focused on Monaco, begins with a dead woman, and the novel tracks back to follow three women each of whom might be the as-yet-unrevealed victim. At times, the detail of clothes is excessive and the style can be somewhat clunky, but the book builds up so that you become interested in the fate of these characters. British lawyers do not emerge well, but, in truth, most of the characters are trapped, whether by greed or need.

Anne Mette Hancock’s third novel, Ruthless (Swift, 2024, £9.99), the translation of a 2020 Danish work, brings back Heloise Kaldan and Erik Schäfer, with the secrets of the past prompting present killing. The unwrapping of past crimes is scarcely unfamiliar territory, but this plot works well, and both writing and characterisation contribute mightily. ScandiNoir without child abuse or Fascism, but with misogyny prominent. The troubling ramblings of an elderly man close to death touch off a journey into the dark underbelly of Danish society, one in which there are surprising revelations, and twists that work including an upending one at the very close. Police neglect if not corruption also part of the equation. Works very well.

We can close on two new books from well-established and successful writers, Jess Ryder’s The Villa (Penguin, 2024) and Janice Hallett, The Examiner (Viper, 2024, £18.99). Counterpointing in this fashion may seem unfair, but both books are being pushed in a similar fashion. Ryder offers us the return of survivors to a Hen Party in which the bride-to-be died. We get clothes, drama, sex, and tensions within a small group. Hallett provides a mixed media novel in which you and The Examiner evaluate the sources – emails, Doodle message board, chat groups, marking evaluations, digital evidence – from Multimedia Art MA, a new course at the fictional, but all-too-real, Royal Hastings College of the University of London. The characters are well-observed, noticeably the ghastly self-righteous judgmental Jem Badhuri, the youngest of the group. There is a degree of caricature, but this is the more sophisticated and searching of the two. Moreover, the greater variety of characters allows for more interactions. Read the Hallett.