The End of the Wasp Season, by Denise Mina (Orion, £12.99)
Scottish author Mina's latest novel starts with an amazingly violent killing during which a woman's face is stamped to a pulp. As this excellent book is very much a whydunnit and not a whodunnit, it's not giving anything away to say that the murderer is 15-year-old Thomas, son of rogue banker Lars Anderson, who has killed himself after luring thousands of investors into penury. Mina paints an unflinchingly accurate picture of the financial, emotional and moral wipeout of the family: Thomas, callous and super-needy; his dead father, still bullying from beyond the grave; his mother, who has spent her marriage in luxurious, medicated misery; and his kid sister, whose needle is about to go right off the dial. Meanwhile, very pregnant DS Alex Morrow is struggling to get her team on board for the murder investigation  the police reserve their sympathy for "innocent" victims and have little to spare for the corpse when it turns out she was a high-class tart. Perceptive and insightful at both ends of the social scale, Mina eschews cliffhangers and plot twists  here, pathos provides the fuel for real suspense. Marvellous.

Sympathy for the Devil, by Howard Marks (Vintage, £6.99)
Sympathy for the Devil is the debut novel from the charismatic Welsh cannabis merchant and 90s folk hero Marks, the "good" drug dealer whose stranger-than-fiction life was appealingly documented in his autobiography, Mr Nice. His first outing in made-up crime has, as you would expect, lots of mentions of different sorts of dope as well as a missing rock star in the shape of panda-eyed, self-harming Richey Edwards-clone Owen Face. Investigating is DS Catrin Price, who's into motorbikes and martial arts, with issues in her past, including a childhood trauma and an undercover-officer-turned-junkie ex-boyfriend. Both, naturally, turn out to have a bearing on matters in the present. Her journey to an implausibly remote and impenetrable part of Wales, presided over by a strange and dangerous cult, is pacey and exhilarating enough, if a tad formulaic.

The Hypnotist, by Lars Kepler, translated by Marlaine Delargy (Blue Door, £16.99)
I can't believe I'm the only book reviewer who experiences a sinking feeling when yet another brick-sized Scandinavian bestseller-in-Europe thuds on to the mat, accompanied by a press release that invokes Stieg Larsson. This latest offering, by Swedish husband-and-wife team Alexander and Alexandra Ahndoril, is a bloated monster, which is a great shame because it conceals a slender, lithe novel based on a pretty nifty idea. DI Joona Linna persuades discredited hypnotist Erik Bark to use his questionable methods of obtaining information on 15-year-old Josef Ek, sole witness to the brutal murder of most of his family. But a confusing time scheme, reams of unnecessary detail and ham-fisted plotting all add up to a lack of urgency and make it hard to engage with the characters or care about what happens to them.

The Hollow Man, by Oliver Harris (Jonathan Cape, £12.99)
Harris's debut novel, the first in a projected series, features a wayward, own-worst-enemy type: Nick Belsey of the Hampstead CID. He plays both sides against the middle, breaking every rule in the book  from toking in the rape suite to stealing a corpse's identity  when a Russian oligarch is reported missing from his enormous but unsecure house on the vista of expensive bad taste that is The Bishops Avenue. And he gets away with it all. Events move at bewildering speed  a little more exposition would have helped with the breathless feeling of tearing, like Buster Keaton, after a train that one can never quite catch  ending in a spectacular finale with James Bond-esque levels of chaos and destruction. Suspend your disbelief and hang on to your hat, and you'll have a whale of a time.

Laura Wilson's A Capital Crime is published by Quercus.