Four of crime's most assured voices, each working at the height of their powers. James frequents the back streets of Brighton, May the occupied landscapes of wartime France, Griffiths in a 1950s seaside world of illusion and missing girls, Rankin in the genteel institutions of Edinburgh that conceal ungentlemanly deeds. Different registers and geographies with the same unblinking commitment to what crime fiction does best.
Peter James - Dead Man's Time Roy Grace unravels a multimillion-pound antiques theft with roots stretching back decades, across continents, through layers of criminal inheritance that someone will kill to keep buried.
Peter May - The Night Gate A skeleton in a French farmhouse wall and a stolen Picasso pull May's investigator across occupied France and back to the present day in this beautifully controlled mystery.
Ian Rankin - Doors Open A group of respectable Edinburgh men plan to steal paintings from the National Gallery of Scotland in a wry, precisely observed standalone that has a sharp eye for how thin respectability actually is.
Elly Griffiths - Now You See Them Brighton, 1950: girls are going missing, and DI Stephens and Max Mephisto move through a world of theatrical illusion and postwar unease with the authority of a writer who makes period crime look entirely effortless.
