The Saint Zita Society by Ruth Rendell (Hutchinson, £12.99)
Rendell's take on contemporary "upstairs-downstairs" is a superbly executed ensemble piece set in an exclusive street in Pimlico, home to the rich and privileged and those who supply their daily wants and needs. The domestics, who form the eponymous society (St Zita is the patron saint of servants), range from handsome Henry (who is servicing both the wife and daughter of his aristocratic employer) and mercenary Montserrat (who facilitates her married mistress's affair with a TV star) to mentally disturbed Dex, who believes that his mobile phone-service provider is the voice of God. Psychodramas abound and, as always, Rendell excels at detailing misunderstandings, paranoia, subtle power-shifts and the laws of unintended consequences. All the characters are kept in play without ever relinquishing the necessary suspense for a fascinating murder mystery.

Weirdo by Cathi Unsworth (Serpent's Tail, £11.99)
Unsworth's fourth novel is set on the Norfolk coast, in a world of amusement arcades, fairgrounds and small-town feuds and intrigues. Policeman-turned-private investigator Sean Ward, up from London to look into a possible miscarriage of justice  a schoolgirl convicted of killing a classmate 20 years before  has a tough job penetrating the clannish insularity and a knot of vested interests. A parallel narrative from the 1980s allows Unsworth to describe the events leading up to the fatality: families broken beyond hope of repair and classroom rivalries which spiral, unchecked, from petty spitefulness to murder. An absorbing mystery, an extraordinarily powerful evocation of time and place and a cast of characters whose every breath feels real  Unsworth gets better with every book.

Bed of Nails by Antonin Varenne, translated by Siân Reynolds (MacLehose Press, £18.99)
More corruption here, this time in the Paris police force, where honest copper Richard Guérin, given the thankless and soul-destroying job of being in charge of suicides, is looking into a spate of bizarre cases. These include American junkie Alan Mustgrave, a nightclub "fakir" who manages to exsanguinate himself during a particularly extreme masochistic performance. Guérin isn't at all sure that it was suicide, and neither is John Nichols, the friend who arrives to identify the body. Bed of Nails is an excursion into Fred Vargas territory with a fair dollop of self-conscious eccentricity  forest-dwelling Nichols comes into town toting a bow and arrows; Guérin lives with a parrot bequeathed to him by his prostitute mother, which punctuates the lonely silence with sexual exhortations. Much is made of the policeman's philosophy that "everything is connected", which leads us down several blind alleys. While this may not be to all tastes, it's an intriguing read, with a bold and surprisingly moving ending.

The Murder of Halland by Pia Juul, translated by Martin Aitken (Peirene, £10)
References to crime fiction on the cover of Danish writer Juul's first book to be translated into English are somewhat misleading. Halland Roe has certainly been murdered and there is an investigation, of sorts; however, the book is a study of the grief and shock that follow the sudden death of a loved one. Told in spare, almost terse, prose, it centres on Halland's partner Bess, who discovers, as the days pass, how little she actually knew about the man for whom she left her family 10 years earlier. There's little in the way of explanation, and no comfort of "closure": this is a disturbing and painful account of a woman whose world has been knocked off its axis.

 Laura Wilson's A Willing Victim is published by Quercus.