Crime: Conjuring banal horrors from human frailty the Ruth Rendell way

No Man’s Nightingale (Hutchinson, €27.50) is the 24th mystery to feature Ruth Rendell’s iconic Insp Wexford, who refuses to go gently into his well-earned retirement.

Invited by his former subordinate Det Supt Mike Burden to help investigate the murder of the Rev Sarah Hussain, Wexford sets aside his beloved copy of Gibbon's Decline and Fall and enters the fray once more. A widow and mother to the teenage Clarissa, Hussain was, Wexford tells us, "far from being the only woman ordained priest of the Church of England but perhaps the only one to have been born in the United Kingdom of a white Irishwoman and an Indian immigrant".

Was religious bigotry the motive for her murder? Such extremism seems unlikely in the quiet market town of Kingsmarkham, but one of the pleasures of Rendell’s novels is the way her deceptively languid prose gradually reveals the turbulent passions that seethe under the placid surface of her genteel settings. The plot appears to meander through various domestic crises – traffic collisions, property disputes, the choice of one religious text over another for the purpose of a sermon – only to erupt into violence that owes its shock value as much to its mundane origins as it does to its lethal consequences. Wexford’s inability to directly affect the murder investigation means the story is unfashionably slow and measured, but Rendell’s ability to conjure banal horrors from human frailty remains undiminished.

Tom Franklin's wonderful Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter was one of the finest novels published in 2010. The Tilted World (Mantle, €24.50), written with his wife, the poet Beth Ann Fennelly, is set in the Deep South in 1927 against the backdrop of the Great Mississippi Flood. Ingersoll and Ham are two undercover Prohibition agents who ride into the town of Hobnob, investigating the disappearance of their predecessors, who are presumed to have been bought off or murdered by hillbilly moonshiners.

They carry with them an infant orphaned when his parents attempted to rob a country store, a baby Ingersoll entrusts to Dixie Clay, a woman who has learned to cope with the death of her own child some years ago by throwing herself into her work as the most prolific bootlegger in the county.

What follows is an epic tale of loyalty and betrayal that plays out in the shadows of the artificially heightened levees as a potentially biblical flood threatens to wreak unimaginable devastation across the delta.

The dirty realism that characterised Franklin's language in Hell at the Breech (2004) and Smonk (2007) is here complemented by Fennelly's poetic flourishes as she conjures up the surreal, apocalyptic landscape in which Ingersoll and Dixie Clay scrabble for survival, although the most satisfying aspect of the novel is the vivid characterisation as Dixie and Ingersoll struggle to dovetail their respective interpretations of right and wrong.

Charles McCarry’s 13th novel, The Shanghai Factor (Head of Zeus, €21.50), opens in the eponymous city with an unnamed, low-level CIA operative colliding with a female bicyclist called Mei. It’s an inauspicious event, but nothing happens to foreign nationals in Shanghai, according to our hero, without the explicit approval of Guoanbu, the Chinese ministry of state security. Soon Mei has seduced our hero, whom she calls Dude, and is helping him to learn Mandarin; Dude is reporting back to his superior in the CIA and receiving orders to infiltrate Guoanbu.

It's a straightforward set-up to a conventional spy novel, but McCarry is a former CIA operations officer who served in Europe, Asia and Africa, and The Shanghai Factor is considerably more subtle and complicated than the standard James Bond thriller. Here the enemy is not the cliched inscrutable, monolithic presence: McCarry gives the Guoanbu network its full due as a sophisticated intelligence-gathering organisation while also sketching in the subtle and complex gradations of Chinese society.

It’s a fascinating character study that tracks back and forth between Shanghai, New York and Washington DC, with much of the skulduggery, betrayal and back-stabbing taking place on our hero’s home turf in the US.

Those who like their spy novels to feature an explosion or an assassination on every other page will be disappointed; readers who prefer a more authentic account of dead drops and black ops will be very satisfied indeed.

Jon Steele's Angel City (Bantam Press, £13.99) is the sequel to The Watchers (2011), a novel that introduced us to Jay Harper, an English private eye living in Lausanne who belatedly realises that he is not a detective but an angel engaged in a timeless war against demonic forces of evil. Angel City opens with Harper foiling a terrorist attack on Paris, which leads to the discovery that a rogue priest is attempting to tap into a celestial power at the ancient Cathar fortress at Montségur, in southern France, with the intention of literally unleashing hell. It sounds fantastical, and it is, but this American author, a former war reporter, is engaged in something more interesting than spinning tales of the supernatural.

The Watchers and now Angel City (the first two parts of the Angelus trilogy) read like Paradise Lost redrafted by Raymond Chandler in a fevered dream, in which the demonic hordes are desperate to secure nuclear weaponry and the angels have the kind of firepower that Milton couldn't have conjured up in his worst nightmares. It's the old tale of good versus evil rewritten as a compelling modern fable.

Declan Burke is an author and journalist. His most recent novel is Slaughter's Hound (Liberties Press)