The Child Who, by Simon Lelic (Mantle, £12.99)
Lelic's third novel after Rupture and The Facility takes a hackneyed, supermarket-thriller theme  the "evil" child who kills  but approaches it so intelligently that suspicions of opportunism are instantly allayed. When Daniel, a quiet 12-year-old boy, is found to have murdered his classmate, the job of defending him falls to provincial solicitor Leo Curtice. Curtice is open enough to understand that abused, neglected Daniel is a victim too. But he has a couple of fatal flaws: unfocused ambition and a naivety so chronic that he simply cannot foresee the impact of his actions on his wife and, especially, his teenage daughter, who suffers terrible bullying at school. An agile, perceptive writer, Lelic makes the most of this, drawing us deep into the family set-up and employing two time-frames so that the grim aftermath is constantly in our minds. Could this be Lelic's breakthrough book? It deserves to be.

Total Immunity, by Robert Ward (Corvus, £17.99)
Ward is a former writer and producer of Miami Vice and Hill Street Blues, so it's little wonder Total Immunity is so redolent of that 80s-TV-Hollywood world. When FBI agent Jack Harper leads a raid on a South African diamond smuggler, Karl Steinbach, and Steinbach vows to kill all the officers involved in capturing him, Harper is unfazed. (He is, after all, "as cool as a pitcher of sangria".) But one by one his partners meet grisly fates. What's in store for Jack? Will his girlfriend cope? And who is the man with the scarred face who was secretly filming the murders? Total Immunity delivers on pace, but the writing is distractingly clumsy, especially the dialogue, and Jack is too much of a cipher for his dark night of the soul to have much force.

Voices of the Dead, by Peter Leonard (Faber, £12.99)
Leonard's previous novels have been jaunty crime capers similar to those of his father, Elmore. This one, set in 1971 and the first of a two-parter, has the same energy and precision but is much darker thematically, more painful and considered. On the surface it's a cat-and-mouse thriller: scrap-metal dealer Harry Levin is determined to track down the German diplomat who killed his daughter when driving drunk. The police tell him the man has been afforded immunity and won't face charges, so Harry travels back to Munich, where he was born, to dispense vigilante justice ... Leonard's handling of Harry's wartime internment in Dachau proves he's no one-trick pony. There are thrills here but also a desperate pathos. If you haven't read Leonard before  and you must  this is a great place to start.

The Map, by TS Learner (Sphere, £6.99)
"Perfect for fans of Kate Mosse and Robert Harris!" screams the blurb to Learner's second post-Da Vinci Code exploitation novel, forgetting to add "if they've had their brains removed". Sphinx, Learner's debut, sold 100,000 copies. The Map follows the Dan Brown formula to the letter: a ludicrous historical backstory involving a mysterious and powerful artefact, in this case a scroll; and an Oxford classics scholar called, for some reason, August, who must stop this scroll falling into the hands of the Russians (we're in 1953). Learner's trademark is the Graphic Chapter Two Sex Scene  here a masterpiece of 1970s thriller-smut ("the thick black bush of her sex"), its transparent purpose to jolt you awake after the interminable verily-my-liege prologue (setting: "Tyburn gallows, London, 1613"). Is this cruel? It's possible Learner, an Australian playwright, envisaged this as nothing more than camp fun, in which case it hits the spot.

 John O'Connell's The Baskerville Legacy is published by Short Books.