In Stalin’s Ghost (Macmillan £17.99), Arkady Renko’s official assignment is to look into recent sightings of Stalin in the Moscow Metro. But Martin Cruz Smith’s detective also investigates, unofficially, a murder mishandled by other cops and an atrocity in Chechnya – all this while wandering the snow-bound city trying to find his missing adopted son and woo back a girlfriend lost to a war hero. Excellently written and peopled by memorably strange characters, the novel is a dazzling panoramic portrait of Russia today in which the dictator’s spectre symbolises a reversion to Soviet ways.

Devil’s Peak by the South African writer Deon Meyer (translated by KL Seegers, Hodder £12.99) interweaves the story lines of three characters: Thobela, an assegai-wielding avenger who kills anyone guilty of harming children; Benny, an alcoholic cop heading the team hunting for him; and Christine, a call girl Benny uses to set a trap. Originally written in Afrikaans, this moving, expertly constructed story of a broken man’s redemption is bound to win awards.

Irish peace negotiator Maggie Costello is the heroine of Sam Bourne’s The Last Testament (HarperCollins £6.99). Asked to lend her skills to talks about dividing Jerusalem, she arrives in Israel just after the shooting by bodyguards of an archeologist who was acting suspiciously at a political rally. Costello discovers he had acquired an ancient tablet with implications for the country’s future, and she and the archeologist’s son are pursued, harassed and spied on by mysterious enemies as they try to work out where he hid it. Like his bestselling debut, The Righteous Men, Bourne’s follow-up is an undisguised imitation of Dan Brown’s synthesis of scholarship and derring-do, but it’s a competent substitute as the prolonged wait for Brown’s next treasure hunt continues and, in some respects, preferable.

Gerald Seymour’s The Walking Dead (Bantam £11.99) is the story of a terrorist plot to kill shoppers in Luton, which has echoes of 7/7 but involves a single suicide bomber. Seymour uses multiple-narrative centres, also including others in the terrorist cell, an armed protection officer, a veteran spook, a blind American agent, and a jury member in a big criminal trial. The satisfying result is a novel that is at once a sophisticated construction and a page-turner, which slyly makes a case for trusting old pros rather than brash or naive upstarts.

In Michael Connelly’s The Overlook (Orion £17.99), a medical physicist’s body is dumped on a hillside overlooking Los Angeles, his wife is found tied up, and radioactive material he worked with is missing. Connelly’s series hero, homicide detective Harry Bosch, struggles to keep his grip on the case as FBI agents – convinced the lethal material was stolen by terrorists – do their best to marginalise him. A typical master-class in plotting, The Overlook resembles The Walking Dead in highlighting the excesses that result when the state’s war on terror gives its operatives carte blanche.

A woman injured in a car accident near Baltimore is initially reluctant to tell police who she is; eventually she claims to be Heather Bethany, one of two sisters who went missing in 1975, assumed dead. Taking a break from her Tess Monaghan series, Laura Lippman in What the Dead Know (Orion £18.99) treats the sabbatical as a chance to produce something more testing, both for herself and the reader. Getting lost is not difficult in a novel that jumps to and fro between the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and now while tracing the lives of the sisters and their parents, but stick with it – the reward is great.

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