LOTS of people talk about defunding the police, but it’s taken a decade of Tory austerity to actually achieve it. 

BAD FOR GOOD (Allison & Busby, £8.99), the first novel by Graham Bartlett, former divisional commander of Brighton and Hove police, is as angry a debut as you could hope for. 

It’s set in a fictional version of the author’s old bailiwick, where ever fewer cops, deploying ever dwindling resources, are scarcely capable any more of responding even to emergency calls. Meanwhile, politicians demand better results at the same monthly meetings where they order more cuts. 

Capitalism abhors a vacuum, as a senior officer discovers when his son is murdered and he’s offered revenge, at a price. It seems that someone has found a way to monetise vigilantism. 

This is an electrifying thriller, original and disturbing. 

A celebrity psychiatrist, living in exile in London in 1936, is found murdered in his locked study in DEATH AND THE CONJUROR by Tom Mead (Head of Zeus, £20). 

Inspector Flint of Scotland Yard dislikes the “burgeoning subgenre” of impossible crimes — and as for the likewise “impossible” theft of a painting which seems to be connected to the killing, he really hasn’t the time to worry about such things. So he seeks the assistance of his friend Joseph Spector, a semi-retired stage magician, and expert in the ways of making impossible events happen. 

Simultaneously a homage to and a loving parody of the locked-room mysteries of the interwar years, Tom Mead’s latest provides a complex, cunningly wrought puzzle. 

MURDER YOUR EMPLOYER by Rupert Holmes (Headline, £20) makes a great deal — perhaps a little too much, for fluency’s sake — of its central concept: a secret campus, somewhere in the world, its location unknown even to its students, at which those who intend to commit justified murders study towards the successful completion of their “theses.” The consequences of failing your exams at this particular college are best not thought about. 

The humour can be a little relentless at times, and at 400 pages the volume risks outstaying its welcome, but this is an irresistibly amusing idea coupled with some very fine plotting. 

NEEDLESS ALLEY by Natalie Marlow (Baskerville, £16.99) is something special. 

Set in Birmingham in 1933, its chief protagonist is William Garrett, who works as a private enquiry agent, specialising in proving infidelity against the wives of the well-to-do. 

Much about his work disgusts him, and when a rising member of the British Union of Fascists hires him to follow his wife, William doesn’t take to his new client at all. But the man’s wife is a different matter entirely. 

Be warned that there is little cheer, and much that’s horrific, in this superbly written mystery debut. It’s a brave private eye writer who uses a famous quotation from Raymond Chandler as her epigraph, but Marlow’s passionate writing about class and sex, less cynical than noir and less sentimental than hardboiled, means she gets away with it.