Almost two decades ago, Philip Kerr published three superb crime novels set in Nazi Germany. Each of the books featured a Berlin detective, Bernie Gunther, a decent cop who disliked Hitler but found himself devoting much of his time and energy to sheer survival. Now, after a long gap, Gunther is back, working as a private eye in Munich, where the aftermath of war and an influx of American money provide him with the means to just about make a living. The One from the Other (Quercus £12.99) is set in 1949 when plenty of people are in denial about their membership of the Nazi party, or trying to distance themselves from relatives with links to war crimes. One of them is a woman who turns up at Gunther’s office, looking for help in tracking down her husband. It isn’t that she wants him back, she explains; the missing man ran a concentration camp in Poland and she is very much hoping that he’s dead. It is the beginning of a case that takes Gunther to the heart of a network of old Nazis who will do literally anything to escape the clutches of a war-crimes tribunal. Staying close to real events, Kerr brilliantly evokes the edgy atmosphere of the postwar period in one of the most gripping and accomplished detective novels published so far this year.

Jason Goodwin’s novels take place in 19th-century Istanbul and feature an unusual main character; Yashim is a eunuch, a source of endless sorrow to him since he cannot have normal relationships with women. The Snake Stone (Faber £12.99) is Yashim’s second outing, and it easily lives up to the promise of Goodwin’s earlier novel, The Janissary Tree. A French archeologist arrives in Istanbul in search of a cache of Byzantine treasure, but his shady past catches up with him and he turns up at Yashim’s apartment late at night, pleading for help. Yashim finds him a passage on a ship to France, but when a mangled corpse is found, he is the chief suspect for the man’s murder. Goodwin’s knowledge of Istanbul is extraordinary, taking the reader from well-known landmarks such as Aya Sofia to the maze of tunnels that supplies the city with water. The solution to this labyrinthine mystery is linked to Byron’s death at Missolonghi, and it makes a perfect summer read.

Elena Forbes’s first novel, Die with Me (Quercus £12.99), brings together the internet and a serial killer who uses it to prey on vulnerable girls and women. The story begins in a church in Ealing, west London, where a lonely schoolgirl has arranged to meet a man she has been corresponding with by e-mail. She thinks they’ve formed a suicide pact, but he has other ideas, and detectives soon find themselves investigating a series of deaths in similar circumstances. This is a fast-moving novel, in which Forbes offers an original and compelling portrait of a murderer.

Robert Ellis’s City of Fire (Macmillan £12.99) is also about the hunt for a serial killer, and it features the graphically brutal violence that has become regrettably commonplace in American crime fiction. When a man arrives home to find his wife murdered in a suburb of Los Angeles, suspicion falls on him until it becomes clear that the crime is part of a series. The detective assigned to the investigation, Lena Gamble, hasn’t fully recovered from the murder of her rock-star brother five years earlier, and the cases turn out to have disturbing parallels. Ellis has written and produced television commercials for political campaigns, and his writing is a cut above that of most authors in the crowded serial-killer field.

The Chatelet Apprentice by Jean-François Parot (translated by Michael Glencross, Gallic Books £11.99) is a terrific debut from a French author and diplomat as well as marking the appearance of a new publishing house dedicated to bringing French fiction to British readers. The novel is set in prerevolutionary Paris where a young detective, Nicolas Le Floch, has to investigate the disappearance of one of his superiors. Working without modern investigative techniques in a police force reliant on torture, Le Floch confronts the ethical dilemmas of the period in a novel that brilliantly evokes the casual brutality of life in 18th-century France.

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