The first world war left hundreds of thousands of women unmarried, living with relatives or other “spinsters” in hotels. Philippa Penhow is one of these women, but she also has an asset in the shape of a run-down boarding-house in Bleeding Heart Square in Holborn. Lonely and intensely conscious of her single status, Miss Penhow cannot resist the dashing Major Serridge, who sweeps her off her feet - and off the face of the earth. Andrew Taylor's Bleeding Heart Square (M Joseph £16.99) is a marvellously evocative novel set in 1934, four years after Miss Penhow's disappearance. Oswald Mosley's blackshirts are menacing London, and another unhappy woman arrives at the boarding-house, fleeing a violent husband who is a fascist sympathiser. Lydia Langstone is aristocratic, unlike Miss Penhow, but even more desperate, and she finds herself plunged into a sinister atmosphere of poverty and assumed identities. Taylor has already demonstrated his eye for unforced historical detail in his Lydmouth novels, set in a provincial English town in the 1950s, and he does London between the wars equally well. There are echoes of Agatha Christie in the complex plot, which has an aspiring journalist and a plain-clothes detective joining forces to watch the inhabitants of No 7 Bleeding Heart Square. But his portrait of desperate lives is infused with a sharp sense of class and politics as British society fractures under the threat of another world war.

Barbara Nadel's Ashes to Ashes (Headline £19.99) is set during that war, on the night of December 29, 1940 when St Paul's Cathedral was almost engulfed by a Luftwaffe firestorm. Francis Hancock, a veteran from the first world war, still haunted by the effects of shell shock, is on his way home to the East End when the bombs begin to fall. Hancock is a classic outsider, an undertaker by trade (not a job that endears him to strangers) and a Londoner who has an Indian mother. When he seeks shelter in the cathedral crypt, he is not exactly welcomed by the other refugees from the air raid and his mental state is made worse by flashbacks to the carnage of the trenches. He leaves the crypt in search of a young girl who seems to have disappeared, forcing him to witness the desperate attempts of fire-watchers to save the cathedral from the flames. Most of them are architects, chosen for their knowledge of how the building was constructed, and Nadel's powerful description of a hellish night makes up for the rather strained plot.

Steven Saylor is on top form with The Triumph of Caesar (Constable £12.99), the latest in his extraordinarily vivid series of crime novels set in ancient Rome. Gordianus the Finder, the private detective we first met as a young man working for Cicero, is growing old with the republic, which has entered its dying days under Julius Caesar, victor of Rome's civil wars. Once again, Gordianus's attempt to stay out of the city's internecine political struggles is frustrated when he receives a summons from Julius Caesar's wife, Calpurnia. She fears an assassination attempt as her husband plans four triumphal parades through the city to celebrate his victories. One will culminate in the humiliation and execution of Vercingetorix the Gaul, another is scheduled to end with the murder of Cleopatra's sister Arsinoe, and Gordianus is uneasy about such ostentatious displays of power. He has no choice but to agree to Calpurnia's request, and his reluctant investigation takes place against the reader's knowledge of a looming threat to Caesar on the Ides of March.

Greg Iles has written a string of bestsellers and his latest novel, Third Degree (Hodder £16.99), is a gripping account of family breakdown in a town in the American South. Warren Shields is a doctor, a respected physician with a lovely wife and two delightful children. As the book opens, Laurel Shields has just made the unwelcome discovery that she is pregnant, but not by her husband; he has made a discovery of his own, an unsigned letter from her lover, prompting him to take his family hostage. The siege that follows is reminiscent of real-life events in America, where hostages are sometimes as much at risk from the weaponry of would-be rescuers as their captors.

Death on a Branch Line (Faber £10.99) is the latest in Andrew Martin's series featuring railway detective Jim Stringer, and takes place at a time when the death penalty was still in use in the UK. In the summer of 1911, a special train stops briefly at York station and Stringer meets a man who has been sentenced to hang for the murder of his own father, a landowner called Sir George Lambert. The condemned man tells Stringer that his brother is about to be murdered, sending the detective on a frantic mission to investigate a crime that hasn't yet happened. This is an eccentric and engaging novel, even if you don't share Martin's passionate interest in steam trains.

Finally, two novels whose characters hail from Istanbul, although they could hardly be more different. The Bellini Card (Faber £12.99) is the third in Jason Goodwin's highly praised series featuring an Ottoman detective, Yashim the Eunuch. On this occasion, Yashim's friend Palewski, the Polish ambassador, takes centre stage, travelling to Venice at the request of the sultan in search of a lost Bellini portrait. Posing as an American art collector, Palewski encounters one trickster after another and bodies begin to pile up, all under the suspicious gaze of the city's Austrian rulers.

The Prophet Murders by Mehmet Murat Somer (Serpent's Tail £7.99, translated by Kenneth Dakan) reveals a little-known side of modern-day Istanbul. In the city's clubs and bars, fear is spreading after the murders of several transvestites. The novel's narrator is an impossibly glamorous drag queen, the manager of a transvestite club, who spends half her time on the internet looking for the religious fanatic who is sending threatening messages about her “girls”. Surprising and entertaining, if slightly misogynist, this eye-opener of a crime novel is not to be missed.

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