Death Comes to Pemberley, by PD James (Faber, £18.99)
PD James's Jane Austen sequel-with-a-murder is Pride and Prejudice and Zombies for the Boden-wearing classes, best approached as the jeu d'esprit it was conceived as rather than as a serious attempt to ape Austen's style and extend the canon. Six years after her wedding, Lizzie B is mistress of Pemberley, happily married and with two young sons. But on the night before the annual Lady Anne's ball, Lydia Wickham arrives at the front door, screaming that her husband has been shot in nearby woodland  There's much here to rile purists, from the sometimes clunky and inconsistent pastiche to the introduction of characters from other Austen novels. The murder mystery, too, is hardly James's finest, but her enthusiasm and affection for the characters keeps you reading in spite of the flaws.

Brodmaw Bay, by FG Cottam (Hodder & Stoughton, £19.99)
Having spent the past 40 years trying to banish memories of Straw Dogs, the Cornish tourist board won't thank Cottam, a former editor of FHM, for setting his fifth novel in as many years in the region. The coastal village of Brodmaw Bay is a picture-perfect rural retreat  just the place for disillusioned James Greer to relocate his family after his son is beaten up on the way home from his Peckham school. There's no litter or graffiti, and for some reason that's enough for Greer to overlook the way the locals keep banging on about "fresh blood", not to mention his wife's curious inability to remember the book about the place that she illustrated as a student. We've been here before, many times. But Cottam's artful chiller has an exuberant innocence about it, as if he's channelling childhood memories of reading James Herbert under the covers.

Blood Relative, by David Thomas (Quercus, £7.99)
Another former magazine editor (of Punch in the 1980s), Thomas has for some years written thrillers under the pseudonym Tom Cain. This, his first under his real name, has a jaunty, David Nobbs-ish quality, even when its Pooterish architect narrator-hero Peter is describing the dead body of his brother, apparently knifed by Peter's beautiful East German wife Mariana. Murdered Andy was a journalist who had been investigating Mariana's Stasi links, but Peter refuses to believe she could be responsible. Blood Relative is frothy fun, though too insubstantial to merit the epithet Hitchcockian despite its gestures in that direction. The bumbling English comic thriller is a tricky genre, requiring precise calibrations of tone. That Thomas keeps us intrigued and gently amused is proof of his skill.

Perfect People, by Peter James (Macmillan, £18.99)
James takes a break from his Roy Grace crime series with this excellent standalone thriller. After John and Naomi's four-year-old son dies from a rare genetic disorder, they throw in their lot with a maverick geneticist, Dr Leo Dettore, whose clinic floats 12 miles off the coast of Cape Cod, beyond the reach of federal law. Will the couple find what they are looking for  a healthy child created at the point where medical ethics, individual responsibility and common sense meet? And can they survive the backlash from religious groups for whom no form of genetic tampering is ever acceptable? As ever, James writes beautifully, maintaining the pace with short, punchy chapters. But it's his firm grasp of the moral issues surrounding designer babies that makes Perfect People so satisfying  and so unsettling.

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