Our dark places

A Gladiator Dies Only Once (Constable, 16.99) is a collection of short stories featuring Steven Saylor's series detective, the ancient Roman Gordianus the Finder. While short stories are not my favourite genre, I found this batch, featuring the forensic orator Cicero, among others, crisp and entertaining. Pleasant holiday fare for vacationers in Rome - and elsewhere.

Kate Ellis, meanwhile, skilfully weaves crimes of past and present into a seamless narrative. In A Cursed Inheritance (Piatkus, 18.99) she mingles a present day murder in Devon with a country-house massacre in 1985 and killings in colonial Virginia 400 years ago. The plotting is intricate, and the finale totally unexpected. This is an agreeable, traditional mystery, though Ellis is in danger of turning Peterson's schoolteacher wife, Pam, into a disagreeable scold.

Ann Granger's Mixing with Murder (Headline, 18.99) features one of my favourite fictional detectives, streetwise Fran Varady. Club owner Mickey Allerton holds Fran's dog hostage, forcing her to go to Oxford to persuade Lisa, a dancer who has left his employ, to return. Before long, another of Mickey's sidekicks, an immigrant from eastern Europe, is found dead. Nothing ever daunts Fran, not even the lies told to her by both Mickey and Lisa. She solves the mystery. But does she get her dog back?

I don't find Grace Gillespie, psychotherapist heroine of Heirs and Graces by Gerald Hammond (Allison and Busby, 18.99), an attractive character. Her politics are not mine, and I did not relish a joke about Jews. Nor am I charmed by the snobbishness about the nobility that gives this book its title. Still, the investigation of the death of Grace's uncle-in-law is well-plotted, the strands of Grace's sleuthing come skilfully together, and Hammond's style is very readable.

Elizabeth George is an exceptionally skilled mistress of the plot, but her books are becoming increasingly unreadable. In With No-one As Witness (Hodder, 17.99) she fills up nearly 600 pages with a story about serial murders in London of mixed-race boys. Although this US author lives in London part-time, her English dialogue is as patronising as it is implausible, while her detectives, the Peter Wimsey-like aristocrat Thomas Lynley and his dysfunctional sidekick, Barbara Havers, are seriously unappealing.

In Lifeless by Mark Billingham (Little, Brown 12.99), Mark Thorne, a police detective in the heart of London, is seemingly a washed-up case who goes underground to try to solve the apparently random murders of homeless men, each kicked to death and found with a 20 note pinned to him. Is this an irrational serial killer, or is there more to discover? Contending with the scepticism of his colleagues Thorne persists, penetrating through to a dazzling, complex conclusion.

Like Thorne, Detective Inspector Vincent Ruiz of the Metropolitan Police is regarded by his colleagues as a wild card. Lost by Michael Robothan (Time Warner, 12.99) starts with Ruiz, wounded, aboard a boat on the Thames. When he comes to he has amnesia - which his colleagues think he's faking. In his pocket is the photograph of a young girl, Mickey, whom everyone believes is dead - but he is convinced is still alive. He sets off on a quest to find her - and his own memory.

In Involuntary Witness by Gianrico Carofiglio (Bitter Lemon, 8.99), Guido Guerrieri is a down-at-heel lawyer in a southern Italian town, making good money by being paid in cash to defend dubious clients. Then he reluctantly takes on the hopeless case of a Senegalese pedlar accused of murdering a white child. Local racism makes the case unpopular and the defendant cannot pay. Written by an anti-Mafia judge from the region where the story is set, it's superbly plotted, full of legal nous and wry humour. The moral regeneration of the lawyer is as gripping as the attempts to secure an acquittal.

One Shot by Lee Child (Bantam, 12.99) is fantastic. In a small city in Indiana, a marksman hiding in a parking lot shoots down five people in a public plaza. Incontestable forensic evidence leads to the shooter's speedy capture. Clearly, the case is solved. But is it? The accused asks the lawyer allocated to him to send for an ex-army cop, Jack Reacher - and Reacher, intrigued and at a loose end, responds. Why has he been summoned? What is there to find out when the evidence is so cast-iron? Child weaves a mesmerising plot with a shock denouement.

Working with partners, James Patterson is extraordinarily prolific. Lifeguard (Headline, 17.99), written with Andrew Gross, tells the story of Ned Kelly, who takes part in what looks like the perfect robbery. All Kelly has to do is trigger off burglar alarms in three Palm Beach mansions that are not going to be robbed. Too good to be true? Ned finds that his partners are dead and he is a murder suspect. In Fourth of July (Headline, 17.99), written with Maxine Paetro, Lieutenant Lindsay Boxer goes on trial when forced to shoot two teenage murderers from an affluent San Francisco family. Both books move at a headlong pace, both are cleverly plotted and Fourth of July has a whammy of a final revelation.

Parts of Eleven on Top by Janet Evanovich (Headline, 14.99) are undeniably funny - and there is some sort of detective plot - but this latest in the Stephanie Plum series soon settles into the old tedious formula, with our New Jersey heroine wrecking cars in a succession of chases on which she is accompanied by her gun-toting Grandma Mazur and the former prostitute, Lula. An implausible sex-kitten, she's lusted after by the hunky cop Joe and the laconic Ranger, whose character does not seem all that different from Hawk, the lethal thug in Robert B Parker's Spenser novels.

Hawk himself turns up in the latest Spenser outing, Cold Service by Parker (No Exit Press, 16.99). Almost killed in a gun-fight, Hawk is planning to take revenge, with Spenser helping. Parker writes with superb skill, and the Boston setting is vividly brought to life. But the story, replete with Ukrainian and other mobsters, is almost incomprehensible, Spenser's girlfriend, Susan, is even more insufferable than usual, and that pet dog, Pearl, really should be put down.