Urgent missions in unique settings

In The Monster In The Box (Hutchinson, £18.99), a man turns up in the Sussex market town of Kingsmarkham who Wexford hasn't seen for many years, but has never forgotten. Wexford has always believed - alone and without any real evidence - that Eric Targo was responsible for at least one unsolved murder, decades ago. But if so, why has Targo returned now?

I found myself transfixed by Wexford's latest puzzle and by the flashback scenes showing us his days as a young detective and active bachelor.

Another long-running series continues in Michael Connelly's Nine Dragons (Orion, £18.99), as Los Angeles police detective Harry Bosch is called to the killing of a liquor-store owner, a Chinese immigrant who has apparently been paying protection to a triad.

The investigation becomes urgent when Bosch's daughter disappears from her mother's home in Hong Kong, presumably kidnapped by the triad to put pressure on Harry.

Plots in which someone close to the protagonist falls prey to the villain he's chasing are a somewhat tired device, but Connelly's verve makes an unoriginal story undeniably thrilling and the Hong Kong setting helps offset the feeling of familiarity.

An exotic setting is also one of the main attractions of The Death Of A Mafia Don by Michele Giuttari (Abacus, £11.99). A bomb explosion on the streets of Florence almost kills the head of the local police flying squad.

Suspicions turn to Islamist terrorism, but the wounded detective isn't so sure - he has recently put a leading Mafia chief behind bars.

Could this be a revenge attack? As the investigation proceeds, an even more disturbing possibility arises - could it be both?

This police procedural written by a former Florence police chief gives an illuminating view of the complex relationships between Mafiosi and cops.

In autumn 1945, in Washington Shadow by Aly Monroe (John Murray, £16.99), British secret agent Peter Cotton is posted to a very hostile country - the US.

Ostensibly he's there as an adviser to John Maynard Keynes, who is trying to negotiate a loan to keep Britain afloat. Keynes's strategy amounts to little more than reminding the US that since Britain's bankruptcy is the result of having fought a war which the US didn't have the stomach for, it has a moral duty to help.

But such sentimental appeals will not sway Washington's new hard-line regime from its prime objective - destroying the British empire and replacing it with a US one.

Meanwhile, Cotton's real job - of fighting for British intelligence's place in the new, post-war pecking order, in a capital city boiling with racism and ruled by paranoia - proves just as murky and far deadlier.

Monroe's novels are a very enjoyable, historically educated combination of espionage fiction's traditionally opaque plots with unexpected characters and effervescent dialogue.