As has been heralded for some time, Colin Dexter's The Remorseful Day (Macmillan, £16.99 in UK) sees the demise of his fictional detective, Morse. Much loved, especially as depicted on TV by the actor John Thaw - with Kevin Whately as the ever-faithful sidekick, Sergeant Lewis - Morse has wended his grumpy way through a dozen tales of dark doings among the dreaming spires of Oxford. The plot-lines and mystery elements always demonstrated a certain tongue-in-cheek humour, but the real strength of the series was the character of Morse himself.
Addicted to Wagner, crosswords and strong ale, he always came across as a three-dimensional human being, not a very happy chappie - for starters, he never got the girl - but an intelligent if vulnerable man, with a penchant for getting to the solution of a crime when everyone else - except possibly the canny Lewis - was flailing about in a fog of misunderstanding.
In this final episode, the murder of a sexually promiscuous nurse, with whom Morse himself may have been involved, forms the basis for a fitting swan song. Tired and sick, Morse nevertheless pursues the truth, like Sisyphus with his rock, until a resolution is achieved. I'll miss Morse, as will millions of others, but perhaps, like another great detective who backtracked up the Reichenbach Falls, he will be resurrected to delight us all. Arkady Renko, Martin Cruz Smith's series detective, who first appeared in the marvellous Gorky Park, has also fallen on hard times. In Havana Bay (Macmillan, £16.99 in UK), he has left Moscow for Cuba, where he is investigating the disappearance and possible violent death of a former colleague, one Colonel Pribluda. Distrusted by the Cuban police and mourning the accidental death of his lover, Arkady is more morose than ever, but as the mystery of the missing Colonel hots up, so too does his enthusiasm for the chase.
Like Morse, Renko is a believable creation, highly flawed, yet with a self-destructive stubbornness that will never let him give up, no matter how difficult the situation. An added bonus here is the manner in which the author sketches in the background of a seedy, falling-to-pieces Cuba, with its fanatical dictator only interested in his own preservation. An intelligent, thoughtful thriller, this, and beautifully written. Ex-lawyer Scott Turow made a name for himself with his legal thriller, Presumed Innocent - the follow-up film starring Harrison Ford didn't do the book any harm, either. In his latest effort, Personal Injuries (Michael Joseph, £16.99 in UK), he harrows familiar ground in fictional Kindle County with his tale of successful personal-injury lawyer Robbie Feaver, brought low by his predilection for salting away money in a secret account and neglecting to pay tax on it. Offered a deal by the FBI to help them break up a conspiracy of crooked judges, he places himself in a considerable amount of danger, but is given an FBI minder, a woman called Evon Miller, to look after him.
Turow has a turgid prose style exacerbated by his penchant for over-explication - at times you feel as if you're drowning in a sea of legal briefs. There is undoubtedly a good story here, but it is immured in so much verbiage that it is hard to get at. Legal eagles may find it fascinating, but for the general reader it may prove to be a bit soporific.
IF you're a fan of the more sedate type of traditional English mystery fiction, then the stories of Douglas Hurd will suit you admirably. In Ten Minutes to Turn the Devil (Little, Brown, £15.99 in UK) he ranges over various locations in order to tell his tales of intrigue, deception and war. A marriage crumbles tragically in the setting of the South African Veldt, a journalist comes up against reality as he attempts to put some perspective on the Falklands War while, amidst the groves of Tuscany, a house party becomes murderously rancorous as dark deeds from the past begin to surface. And in a mere eight pages, in the story "Fog of Peace", our author manages to find a solution for the Troubles in Northern Ireland. What about that, then? Joe R. Lansdale comes from Texas, and if the people he writes about are typical of that state, then I never, ever want to go there. In his latest offering, Freezer Burn (Gollancz Trade Paperback, £9.99 in UK), he introduces his readers to as creepy a collection of weirdos as ever inhabited the towers of Babylon. Chief among them is anti-hero Bill Roberts, who keeps his dead mother freeze-dried in her bedroom, commits a robbery that goes disastrously wrong, is responsible for a sheriff's deputy shooting himself in the head, joins up with a freak show, makes friends with Conrad the Dog Man, and lusts after Gidget, the trailer-trash blonde.
Blacker than Florida's Carl Hiassen, Lansdale's work is not for the squeamish, but it does possess a pace and verve that can exhilarate.
If the television series Only Fools and Horses exhibited the more benign side of the South London crime scene, then Mark Timlin's sequence of Nick Sharman novels surely shows the more dangerous edge. The fifteenth to date, Quick Before They Catch Us (No Exit Press, £14.99 in UK), is no exception, being a dark tale of lust, violence and death, as Private Detective Sharman is hired by a rich Manchester businessman to find his runaway teenage daughter. Unsavoury in the extreme, yet still exerting a dark fascination, Timlin's novels explore the underside of life as deftly as a coroner's knife dissects a murder victim.
Michael Painter is a writer and critic