The cloning of Holmes and Watson goes on apace, although I must say that Kate Moss's novels featuring amateur sleuth Julian Kestrel and his faithful companion, Dipper Stokes, do show many original traits. In her latest, The Devil in Music (Hodder & Stoughton, £16.99 in UK), it is the 1820s and Kestrel is holidaying in Lombardy. Coming across a four-year-old murder case - the shooting of Italian nobleman Ludovico Malvezzi - our hero just has to stick in his fourpence-worth, and in no time at all the spaghetti alla bolognese has hit the fan. Among the suspects are the victim's beautiful young second wife, his son, his son's estranged spouse and her counter-tenor lover, members of the Carbonari - secret rebels against the rule of Austria - and the captivating English tenor known only as "Orfeo". The musical background is only one of a number of felicitous touches in a book that left me wishing for more.
Elizabeth George is an American who writes traditional English mystery stories. Her series of novels featuring D.I. Thomas Lynley and Sergeant Barbara Havers has come in for much critical acclaim. In her ninth, Deception on His Mind (Hodder & Stoughton, £16.99 in UK), Havers is working alone, investigating the murder of a Pakistani man, found dead on the beach of Balfors-le-Nez, a dying coastal town in Essex. Is it a drug-related crime, or one that has been racially motivated? That's the conundrum that faces the intrepid Sergeant as she sifts through the morass of conflicting evidence in the case. She's on a hiding to nothing, for by arresting a white person, she'll have the natives of the town up in arms, while taking an Asian into custody will do likewise for the Pakistani community. How she solves her problem, and the crime, takes up the remainder of a big book - 566 pages - that could possibly have maintained its pace better by being less bulky.
Mary Higgins Clark is no stranger to readers in the crime genre, and in Pretend You Don't See Her (Simon & Schuster, 15.99 in UK) she gives us a suspense tale in which Lacey Farrell, a rising star on Manhattan's real estate scene, is put into great jeopardy merely by being in the wrong place at the wrong time. She arrives at a murder scene, catching the perpetrator at work, and has to be put into the Witness Protection Programme in faraway Minneapolis. Soon, of course, the villain of the piece appears, and Lacey has to use all her ingenuity - awesome, in this case - to get herself out of the fix she is in. Good plotting here, nicely drawn characters and an upbeat ending. And a new meaning to the rude refrain "Who the f*** is Alice" from the song, Living Next Door to Alice.
Philip Kerr comes with a big reputation and an ability to have his novels taken up by film companies. Well, they do say some of the best movies have been based on poor books, and this will truly be the case if A Five Year Plan (Hutchinson, £15.99 in UK) is ever put on the screen. Kerr is Scottish and lives in London, but this volume is an effort to emulate the off-the-wall pyrotechnics of such transatlantic writers as Elmore Leonard or Carl Hiassen, though the result is very bad pastiche indeed. For what it's worth, the plot concerns the efforts of ex-con Dave Delano to rip off the Mob and take revenge for the five years he has spent in stir because he wouldn't snitch. Efforts to lend weight to a crash-bang-wallop scenario by quoting heavyweights like Dostoyevsky, Plato and so on merely point up the ineptness of the whole design.
Now saddle up for an old pro in the literary horse racing stakes: Dick Francis, with 10-lb Penalty (Michael Joseph, 16.99 in UK). Suffice to say that this latest offering is up to the usual standard: bland writing, bland plotting and dialogue so banal it would make Bart Simpson wince. But it will be as popular as its predecessors. The story is told by young Benedict Juliard, whose wish in life is to ride in steeplechases as an amateur jockey. His father, an aspiring politician, has other plans for him - university, a good education, a job in the city - and goes to the unlikely lengths of getting him banned from Sir Vivian Bur radge's racing stables for gluesniffing in order to deflect his interest from the sport of kings. The story goes rapidly downhill from here, and the only thing that kept me reading was the ever more bizarre names with which Mr Francis adorns his supporting characters: a vindictive widow called Olga Nagle, a murderous businessman named Alderney Wyvern, and a noisome paparazzo with the truly glorious appellation of Usher Rudd. For some people, reading Dick Francis must be comparable to pulling on an old much-loved overcoat and wellingtons and going for a walk in the country.
Daniel Easterman writes big blockbuster adventure stories, and his K is for Killing (HarperCollins, £16.99 in UK) postulates a l940s USA where right-wing rednecks have taken over, minorities are incarcerated in concentration camps and terror reigns. The lone hero is John Ridgeforth - what a fine, flinty name - and he is smuggled into enemy territory on a secret mission: to link up with the Resistance and assassinate a high-powered leader. Pure escapism, the book has stock characters who speak stock dialogue, but the narrative has a pace and crackle to it that keeps one reading.
Alastair MacNeill's main claim to fame before striking out on his own is that he put flesh on storylines that Alistair MacLean left behind when he died. Now, in Double-Blind (Gollancz, £15.99 in UK), he is his own man, but the formula of his predecessor remains. This is Boy's Own storytelling at its most basic, with the good guys - and gals - of the US Drugs Enforcement Agency competing against the horrible villains of the Mexican Cartels. On that level, it makes for a fair share of entertainment - buy it for the beach or for that long plane, train or automobile journey.
Finally, Death of a Lady's Maid, by Judith Cook (Headline, 17.99 in UK - rather over-priced?), a mystery set in Elizabethan London, with Dr Simon Forman, medical practitioner and renowned horoscope caster, investigating the death of a young girl pulled from the Thames one cold spring morning. A gold pendant found in her pocket leads the intrepid doctor and his burly manservant, John Bradedge, to the stately home of Sir Wolford Barnes, and into a complex mystery involving Sir Wolford's beautiful daughter Olivia. Ms Cook sets her scene well and gives a fine feeling of what the atmosphere of the time might have been like. I enjoyed this one very much.
Michael Painter is a freelance journalist