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What It Was by George Pelecanos. Orion, £9.99

Derek Strange wears “low-rise bells, a wide black belt, brass-eyed stacks, a rayon shirt stretched out across his chest, and a thick Roundtree mustache”. George Pelecanos’s description of his macho black hero in What It Was will have an immediate, nostalgic resonance for those of us who fondly (if fuzzily) recall the early 1970s roll-call of balls-to-the-wall blaxploitation movies, the ones with the sizzling titles: Hell Up in Harlem, Shaft’s Big Score!, Slaughter’s Big Rip-off.

What It Was lovingly re-creates an urban place at an explosive time: Washington DC in the sweltering Watergate summer of 1972, when Strange, Pelecanos’s DC cop turned private eye, teams up with his white former partner, the veteran homicide detective Frank “Hound Dog” Vaughn. Seemingly routine separate cases bring these wayward men, both with flawed moral codes, into the orbit of Robert Lee Jones, aka Red Fury, a fearless black criminal blazing a trail of robbery and murder across the inner city.

I pretty much loved every sentence of this novel, both for the pacy, hard-boiled plot and for Pelecanos’s nonstop grab bag of pop-cultural references. As befits one of the leading writers on The Wire, his descriptive prose is endlessly quotable. A black witness is “a nicely put-together gal who had the Marcus Garvey thing going on in her apartment”. A white suburban housewife wears “bell-bottom jeans, a leather vest, rope sandals, and a Hanoi Jane shag straight out of Klute”. Isaac Hayes, the Black Moses himself, has a cameo, walking to his limo shirtless, “his big chest and shoulders draped in the multiple, thick-link gold chains he’d worn at Wattstax”.

What It Was really cries out for a soundtrack, so for maximum reading pleasure throw a slab of wax on to the turntable: War’s The World Is a Ghetto or Hayes’s Hot Buttered Soul should do splendidly. Kevin Sweeney

Waiting for Sunrise by William Boyd. Bloomsbury, £12.99

This is the most affable of historical thrillers: its actor hero is called, with apt theatricality, Lysander; the femme fatale goes by the unmysterious name Hettie Bull; Freud and the young Hitler make cameo appearances without darkening the atmosphere; the first World War chugs along, but not too noisily, in the background; and Lysander’s sex problem clears up as soon as thoroughly modern Hettie has him strip off to pose for a bit of sketching.

It’s the sex problem that brings Lysander to Vienna at the novel’s start. It is 1913, and he has an appointment with a psychiatrist, one of an exotic new breed who cannot yet be found in Lysander’s home city of London.

At Dr Bensimon’s consulting rooms he encounters the agitated Hettie for the first time and also meets an English diplomat called Alwyn Munro, who will later recruit him in a spot of espionage that could change the course of the war.

Dr Bensimon, having listened to Lysander’s problems for a while, then explains his innovative psychiatric method, parallelism, which means, in essence, telling yourself constantly that the past was better and less traumatic than you’d thought. This method seems to work pretty well for Lysander and, it must be said, for the bulk of Boyd’s novel, too. But as the action shifts to London, the trenches and Geneva, then back to London, and the violence and intrigue intensify, the book’s unshiftable tone of bluff cheeriness gradually begins to undermine the well-constructed story’s authenticity and plausibility.

Trapped in a strangely timeless zone of country house and theatreland, of bubbly dialogue and plain-speaking exposition, the book is too comfortable with itself to convey the sense of growing modern unease that is clearly intended to be its theme. Giles Newington

The Third Day by Chochana Boukhobza, translated by Alison Anderson. MacLehose Press, £18.99

The French-Tunisian author Chochana Boukhobza sets her third novel in Jerusalem in the late 1980s. It is a city where remembrance is expected to be handed on from generation to generation, and the passage of time is marked as much by the fear built up around days of religious observance as by weeks and months ticked off on a calendar.

Rachel has become a successful cellist at the Juilliard School, in New York, and now she returns to her home town to give a concert with her mentor, the Israeli musical icon Elisheva. Rachel’s parents have aged, grown even more set in their ways, and they measure the success of a woman not by the life she has created for herself but by the marriage she makes, the children she bears and her observance of her heritage. Since Rachel left Jerusalem, her individual talent has defined her, but her return illustrates the cultural changes that have also shaped her, and she now questions her place in this city that was once her entire world.

Elisheva has her own reasons for coming to Jerusalem: music, family, memory and Eretz Israel, the Land. Once imprisoned in Majdanek concentration camp, in Poland, she is increasingly haunted by those dark days with her family, innocently awaiting torture and a brutal death. And now, through an international network of contacts, Elisheva has learned that a Nazi doctor, the so-called Butcher of Majdanek, is to visit Jerusalem at the same time as her concert with Rachel. Her plan is simple: an eye for an eye.

The story’s translation from French somewhat hinders Boukhobza’s characters in coming entirely to life on the page, but their familiar struggles with family expectations, and their loyalty to and love of the place they call home, give this a story a glowing heart and a compelling conclusion. Claire Looby