Believing the Lie, by Elizabeth George (Hodder, £18.99)
Following the murder of his wife on their doorstep and a breakdown that had him wandering the coast of Cornwall in a daze, Detective Inspector Lynley has found solace sleeping with a colleague, the cobra-like Superintendent Isabelle Avery. But then he's called away to the Lake District to review in confidence the suspicious death of Lord Fairclough's nephew, who may have been murdered by the peer's reformed drug-addict son. George's novels can feel loose and sprawling  a function of their length, perhaps  but this is a blind. In fact, she's a designer of fastidious mosaics that never fail to intrigue. And considering it's imagined from a distance  George lives in Washington state  the plausibility of her Britain is impressive, despite having more toffs per square metre than you'd find in, say, Ruth Rendell.

Stolen Souls, by Stuart Neville (Harvill Secker, £12.99)
Neville's third outing confirms him as the king of Belfast noir  though that barely does justice to the hellish landscape he has made it his job to chronicle. It opens with Ukrainian prostitute Galya stabbing Tomas, a Lithuanian trafficker, to death, "the glass [grinding] against a hardness in his neck until something snapped". Inspector Jack Lennon returns, and there may be momentary confusion for those who haven't read The Twelve and Collusion. Lennon has no wish to be involved in this case and wants to stay at home to spend Christmas with his daughter, but when a cop ends up dead there's no avoiding it. Galya, meanwhile, goes on the run and is saved by a Baptist pastor  but it's not the sort of salvation you'd want. You read Stolen Souls wincing, in thrall to Neville's brilliance but wishing you weren't.

Finders Keepers, by Belinda Bauer (Bantam, £14.99)
Dark Side, Bauer's follow-up to her bestselling Blacklands, struck some as disappointing. Any doubters' faith should be restored by Finders Keepers, set once again in the tiny Exmoor village of Shipcott. The set-up is chillingly simple: across the moor, children are being stolen from parked cars, notes placed on steering wheels declaring "You don't love him". Again, we meet Jonas Oldacre, back on the beat after his wife's death; Steven, now 17 and infatuated with the daughter of a wealthy landowner; and Reynolds, with whose unconvincing hair transplant Bauer has wry fun. Bauer's books work because of their deep sense of how rural communities work (and don't work), and of the tensions between locals and incomers. The grimness is offset by humour and, in this case, romance. Excellent.

Crimes in Southern Indiana, by Frank Bill (Heinemann, £12.99)
A series of stories connected by recurring characters and the theme of retribution, Crimes  is a bleak portrait of impoverished rural America where toothless rednecks kill each other over meth deals and sell their grandchildren into prostitution, there being no jobs or hope and all faith in conventional justice having been lost. Is it good? Hard to say. It's brutal and intoxicating and skates close to caricature. The few women who stagger through it are mostly punchbags: "The woman's body bounced from wall to wall like a winning pinball." The rapist in one of the most disturbing stories, "All the Awful", has "the scent of coagulated chicken swelled in three days of hundred-degree heat"  a line that manages to be both slapdash and overwrought and encapsulates a lot of what's wrong with the book. Bill has something, though, and it will be interesting to see what he does next.

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