Academic Oskar Jensen has taken themes from dozens of golden age novels and made something new – and funny – out of them. Some years after their graduation, a group of six university friends are invited to the enormous house of one of their contemporaries, who has made a fortune from an app. They are treated to a delectable dinner cooked by his housekeeper, Kirsty, and reminisce about their years at Oxford, before retiring to bed. The next day a corpse is discovered. By now the weather has worsened. No one can get in or out, and all their mobiles have been locked away at the host’s instruction and can’t be retrieved. An initial investigation is launched by three of the guests: police officer Ruth, lawyer Leyla and academic Torben Helle. Ancient grievances, guilts and resentments are aired as the three analyse clues and make inferences until a solution is reached. Self-conscious in the best way, with an array of literary references, this is an excellent cosy crime novel.

Jenny Hollander’s impressive first crime novel is an exploration of the devastating effects of guilt. High-flying magazine editor Charlie Colbert has everything going for her in New York. She has massively increased the circulation of her magazine, is engaged to the owner’s heir and lives in his luxurious town house. However, she is also haunted by memories of having lied to the police, who were investigating a double stabbing at her elite university. After the assaults, a young woman jumped, fell or was pushed out of a window, accidentally killing a passer-by. Charlie was unconscious at the time but told the police she saw everything. Now one of the other people involved is making a film of the notorious event and promising revelations. The ripples of this news reach England, where Charlie’s heroic parents are looking after her disabled younger sister and still mourning the death of her elder brother. Charlie will do anything to protect them. Told through her recollections, her sessions with her therapist and direct narration, this story works well as both an investigation of a very cold case and a portrayal of a woman on the edge.

Publisher Nita Prose, whose first novel, The Maid, was a New York Times bestseller and popular all over the world, has now written a sequel. The Mystery Guest once again stars Molly Gray, the head maid at the Regency Grand Hotel. Molly is neurodivergent, but Prose gives no specific details. Instead, with warmth and humour, she reveals Molly’s strengths and weaknesses as she investigates a murder at the hotel and thinks about her past. Her great good fortune in an otherwise difficult childhood was being brought up by her grandmother, whose own tough story is revealed during this novel. Gran gave Molly all the advice she needed to grow up in a world that didn’t understand her. She also provided her with plenty of helpful maxims, which Molly passes on to those who require them. The solution to the mystery of who killed Mr Grimthorpe is neither here nor there, but the portrait of Molly is lovely. 

The unlikely but enduring partnership of barrister Michael Deacon and intelligence agent Joe Dempsey continues in the fifth of Tony Kent’s thrillers. This time the action switches between the Netherlands and the United States after a mass shooting in The Hague’s Grote Markt, involving the death of a lawyer working on a case at the International Criminal Court. A sinister figure known as the Monk is pulling strings and forcing an army of unwilling victims to carry out horrific violence against the forces of law and order. The fight scenes are excellent and full of helpful tips about how to interpret your adversary’s body language when you are in close combat and fearing for your life. One tremendous coincidence drives the action but the whole thing is such fun that its unlikeliness does no harm. 

Journalist Claire Coughlan tackles one of the many distressing aspects of Ireland’s past in this novel, set in 1968. Nicoletta Sarto finds herself challenging misogyny and sexism as she tries to build a career writing for the Irish Sentinel newspaper. The body of Julia Bridges, a long-missing actress, is found when Nicoletta is on a night shift. Using her contacts with the Garda and fighting to keep hold of the story, she uncovers not only the truth about Bridges’s disappearance but also a wider story of illegal abortions, secret adoptions and forged birth certificates. Her own relationship with a married colleague leads to sneers and leers, and then the terror of pregnancy. This involving story shows the importance of the rights women have won in the past half-century and the need to ensure they are not compromised now.

A junior barrister finds herself in court with no memory of her name, the case she’s involved in or why she’s there. Soon she discovers that her silk has been killed in a car crash and she now has sole responsibility for defending a man accused of causing multiple deaths in a terrorist bombing. The date is apparently 18 November 1996. The judge seems to know too much about her and her opposite number is bursting with arrogance and sexism. Things become increasingly peculiar as she finds that the court is on an island whose only hotel is grim and ill-equipped. Someone seems to be following her, all her telephone calls are tapped or interrupted, and people keep threatening her. There are also hints of supernatural intervention. The well-constructed account of Lila’s nightmare comes across as a howl of frustration at the state of the British legal system. For my taste, it would have been more effective had it been set within a recognisable present and without its woo-woo aspects. 

A young woman from the wrong side of the tracks has to fight to make her wealthy boyfriend’s childhood friends accept her in this twisty American thriller about identity, manipulation, blackmail and crimes of all sorts. It is impossible to give any further details of the plot, however, without providing spoilers. First Lie Wins is clever, entertaining and fast-moving. The main character, who appears with several different names as the novel moves between her adolescence and the present day, is attractive enough, in spite of her nefarious activities, to make you root for her in her endeavours.

Another stylish cosy crime novel comes from chef and cookery writer Orlando Murrin. He has set it in an upmarket cookery school in Belgravia, where Paul Delamare is persuaded to stand in as teacher by his old friend Christian Wagner. Christian is the more successful and well known of the two, a handsome and charismatic TV chef, but he has broken his arm and therefore cannot demonstrate the finer points of chopping and baking. When Christian is murdered, Paul finds his body and soon becomes the chief suspect. In between explaining himself to the police and providing alibis, he carries out his own investigation, which ends in a magnificently silly and violent battle in the basement kitchen. Colourful, entertaining and full of social observations, the account of Paul’s odyssey also has some moments of genuine emotion.

Police procedural novels can suffer from over-research and overfamiliarity, but James Henry brings a welcome individuality to this novel, which is set in Essex in 1991. Years earlier, Bruce Hopkins escaped drugs charges by fleeing to the Costa del Sol. Now he has returned home after receiving a letter from his wife forgiving him for everything and begging to see him again before her terminal illness worsens. We soon discover that she didn’t write it and is in the best of health. When he is found dead, the local police pick their way through his background and the clues to uncover a neat (and cruel) conspiracy and an understandable desire for vengeance. The roots of the revengers’ rage become clear early in the novel, and the ramifications are convincing and distressing. The police characters are appealing, and the misery and hatred are lightened with humour wherever possible.