The Dead of Night, EXMT374B

The clocks go back shortly, and the dark then descends swiftly. Britain's finest crime writers know exactly what to do with the gloom. In Brighton, a grieving mother wants someone to pay for her child's death while Rebus, his hands burned in a fire, investigates a shooting at a private school. A stranger's will drags a foster child's past into the daylight, and on a Norfolk airfield the wrong man turns up inside a buried fighter plane. Draw the curtains and lock the back door!

Peter James, 'Dead Man's Grip' - A student cyclist dies in a Brighton road accident, and when two of the drivers involved are hunted down, Roy Grace races to keep the third, solicitor Carly Chase, alive. Ian

Ian Rankin, 'A Question of Blood - An ex-soldier shoots three teenagers at a private school and then turns the gun on himself.  Rebus, nursing burned hands he would rather not explain, discovers that one of the dead boys is his cousin's son.

Ann Cleeves, 'Burial of Ghosts' - A brief holiday affair in Morocco ends with a solicitor's letter: Philip has died and left Lizzie Bartholomew £15,000, on conditions that drag her childhood in foster homes back into the light.

Elly Griffiths, 'The Ghost Fields' - A fighter plane buried on a wartime airfield in north Norfolk gives up a body that isn't the pilot's. Ruth Galloway soon learns it belongs to a local aristocrat supposedly lost at sea.