Tami Hoag is an American who writes psychological thrillers, and in her latest, Ashes to Ashes (Orion, £9.99 in UK), she introduces us to a serial killer called the Cremator. No need to go into details about the origin of the name - Ms Hoag does, and how - but suffice to say that there's not much left of his victims when he has done with them. On his trail is ex-FBI agent Kate Conlan, who is now working as a protector of traumatised witnesses to crimes. One such is teenage runaway Angie, who caught a glimpse of the Cremator on the point of igniting his fourth victim, and is now sure that she can recognise him. Conlan, with the help of her former lover, Agent John Quinn, pursues the killer down the labyrinth of his dark psychoses, and in the process puts both herself and Angie in danger. Hoag writes well, if a little too gratuitously, of the bizarre world that allows such creatures as the Cremator to exist, and in Kate Conlon she has created a very human heroine. Recommended, but only for those with strong stomachs.
RED GOLD (HarperCollins, £16.99 in UK), is Alan Furst's follow-up to his equally superb The World at Night. Set in occupied Paris in the early 1940s, both novels have as protagonist Jean Claude Casson, one-time film producer and man-about-town, but now reduced to penury and forced to work as amateur saboteur. In The World at Night he had the chance to escape to England, but jumped overboard when the boat was a little way out and swam back to shore. The main reason was a kind of aristocratic patriotism, but he also hoped for a reconciliation with the young actress Citrine, the great love of his life. Now, in Red Gold, Citrine is married to someone else and Jean Claude is once more involved in the dangerous undercover work of the Resistance. Furst is a master at creating atmosphere, using a sinuous prose style to build up fear and foreboding in the night-time streets of Paris. And in Casson he has created a hero for the time, a knight-errant more in the style of Don Quixote than James Bond, but as unforgettable as both.
With Conor Cregan's First Strike (Hodder & Stoughton, £16.99 in UK), we have moved on to the Cold War. It is 1949, and the world is on the brink of another conflict, with Stalin possibly the one to push it over the edge. In order to effect a coup in the Kremlin, the CIA and the SIS plot to release from prison the one man who can lead such a revolt. The problem is, the prison is a gulag and the man may have to be persuaded to carry out the designs of his rescuers. Cregan's prose style is simplistic in the extreme - I was particularly taken with a hero, one Patrick Twilight, who can exhale "his frustration through his nose" and possesses "a stare that used one of his eyes to hold you firm while the other one checked you out" - but he tells a good story at a rattling good pace.
Joseph Kanon's The Prodigal Spy (Little, Brown & Co, £16.99 in UK), starts off in the early Cold War era, like his former bestselling Los Alamos. This section is concerned with the defection to Moscow of Walter Kotlar, a Soviet agent about to be exposed by a congressional committee in Washington. He leaves behind his 10-year-old son, Nick. The story then jumps forward to 1969, with Nick studying at the London School of Economics and being told by journalist Molly that his father, who is seriously ill in Prague, wishes to see him one last time before he dies. Nick visits him and is given information on the identities of Soviet agents still in place in America. The book then takes off as a chase-thriller, with Nick and Molly always just one step ahead of their deadly pursuers. What gives the book its particular flavour is the assured re-creation of the Eisenhower and Nixon eras, the period detail dovetailing seamlessly into the weave of the storyline.
Daniel Woodrell has received critical plaudits for his string of crime novels, most of them set in the Bayou country of Louisiana. Tomato Red (No Exit Press, £10.00 in UK), is his la test, this time located in a small Ozark town in Missouri, and in it Woodrell charts the violent course of the lives of a number of spaced-out individuals. There is ex-whore, Bev, her angry 19-year-old daughter, Jamalee, her drop-dead-beautiful son, Jason, and the stranger in town, Sammy Barlach, a man with a criminal record on the high road to nowhere. Around these, and a few other would-be psychopaths, Woodrell weaves a tale of lust, violence and murder that winds up with no happy ending. The prose is good-ole-boy, down in the backwoods off-putting, with none of the lyrical descriptive beauty of James Lee Burke's style in his Dave Robicheaux novels. An acquired taste - if you think it is worth the trouble.
Although born in Cumbria, Lee Child sets his thrillers in America, his hero being Jack Reacher, a former military policeman. In Tripwire (Bantam Press, £9.99 in UK), Reacher is digging swimming pools in Key West when a private detective called Costello comes asking questions about him. At first, determined to keep out of trouble, he hides his identity, but then Costello turns up dead, a woman from his past reappears, and resonances of Reacher's time in Vietnam start reverberating. A big, brash action novel, this, ideal for that long train or plane ride.
Michael Painter is a writer and critic