Agent of the State by Roger Pearce (Coronet, £14.99)
Pearce is a former Special Branch officer at New Scotland Yard who rose to be its commander. The hero of his debut, charmless DCI John Kerr, runs a covert policing unit within Special Branch  so covert he is answerable to no one and able to leap any barrier. The dramatic opening chapter finds Kerr and his daughter caught up in a failed tube bombing shortly before the 7/7 attacks. Kerr races after the terrorist, corners him and kills him with an improvised neck tourniquet while observing, "You tried to murder my daughter, you piece of shit." It's one of several moments where the book's much-vaunted commitment to authenticity seems questionable. Still, it's fast-paced, codeword-heavy fun, even if Pearce's idea of characterisation is to give a man a geordie accent "as rich as if he had just ridden down from Newcastle".

Mission to Paris by Alan Furst (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £18.99)
Furst's commercial stock has risen sharply since he started giving his novels meat-and-potato titles such as Spies of the Balkans (a TV Book Club choice last year and his best seller to date). While it continues this trend, Mission to Paris is as intricate and enjoyable as anything Furst has written. It's 1938 and Paris is flooded with German money and spivvy opportunists. Hollywood actor Fredric Stahl  "mostly he played a warm man in a cold world"  has come to the city to make a film, a pawn in a trade-off between Warner Brothers and Paramount. But as an émigré he has a unique status which makes him uniquely exploitable  Furst's high level of surface period detail is expertly deployed to make us feel as if we're stranded in the past without a guide. Nothing is needlessly explained; it just happens, quickly and thrillingly.

Strindberg's Star by Jan Wallentin, translated by Rachel Willson-Broyles (Corvus, £12.99)
This post-Da Vinci Code assemblage of ancient artefacts, Norse myth, nazism, travelogue and secret societies, has been a bestseller across Europe. It sounds a solid enough piece of genre hackwork, but the translation from Swedish is woeful: "The frozen instant had slashed its way into Elena's dreams"; and (my favourite) "The amphetamine seemed to have fried a crack into his memory." Heroic double act Don Titelman (a doctor addicted to anti-anxiety pills) and his lawyer Eva are preposterous characters. Almost as preposterous as the plot, which turns on a fact about Eva that is incredible and demands lengthy explanation if we're to suspend our disbelief. Wallentin, incapable of clearing up after his stinky narrative messes, deals with it in a line.

The 500 by Matthew Quirk (Headline, £11.99)
You can see why journalist Matthew Quirk's superior debut, a corporate thriller cut from the same cloth as The Firm, has been bought by 20th Century Fox. There's a smooth simplicity about the setup: Mike Ford, the born-criminal son of a gangster, is determined to go straight but ends up in DC working for the Davies Group, a powerful political consulting firm in which criminal behaviour is draped in a cloak of legality. The 500 has two trump cards: narrator Ford, clever and self-aware enough to be charming but flawed enough to have been tempted by what was obviously a Faustian pact; and evil Henry Davies, his boss, who collects influential people "like baseball cards" and believes everyone has a price. If you enjoyed AD Miller's Snowdrops  another absorbing study in elastic morality  give this a go.

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