Crime Fiction

While Britain in the 1950s struggles to come up with its own H-bomb, it's the job of CIA London chief Kit Fournier to stop that happening. Britain must be taught, by whatever means necessary, that it is now a colony, not an empire and that, in future, all important decisions will be taken in Washington, not Westminster.

But Kit, the aristocratic protagonist of Edward Wilson's second novel, The Envoy (Arcadia Books, £11.99), is in danger of going native.

Ever more revolted by his own country's post-war course and feeling increasingly at home among the British, Kit is also tortured by the ease and skill with which he performs his often terrible duties. His obsessive love for his cousin doesn't help matters, nor does the fact that she is married to one of Britain's leading atomic researchers.

This is not only one of the three or four best spy novels I've ever read, it is also a startlingly honest and insightful account of the post-war settlement and the true motives behind the cold war. Every Morning Star reader should read it.

There's plenty more dishonesty and betrayal in Point of No Return (Headline, £19.99) by Scott Frost, in which southern Californian police detective Alex Delillo is asked by a desperate woman to find her missing husband.

He's a former cop who's been working for a private "security" firm in occupied Iraq. He hasn't returned home from his tour of duty and his wife believes that he's on the run because of something that he found out over there.

Frost doesn't hesitate to paint occupied Iraq as a country lost in the hideously corrupt, brutal rule of these organisations, which, as one of Delillo's colleagues points out, used to be called mercenaries. Now they own Iraq and, he tells her, "They're still just mercenaries."

The final revelations won't disappoint conspiracy thriller fans in their awfulness - hard as it is for fiction writers to come up with anything that'll still shock anyone who's been following the occupation - while lovers of action novels will find in Delillo a hero well-suited to gunplay, tense chases, doomed bravery and anguish.

Robert Barnard's new mystery Last Post (Allison & Busby, £19.99) provides light relief, of a sort.

Eve returns to her childhood home in West Yorkshire to make funeral arrangements for her mother, a much-loved local head teacher. Among the many letters of condolence is one extraordinary note, addressed to her mother and apparently from an old lover.

Eve gradually realises that much of what she thought she knew about her immediate family is false - and her attempts to sort truths from lies lead to murder.

The pace here is gentler and the action less physical than in my first two choices, but the final twist proves that Barnard's decades in the game have not turned him soft just yet.