A CAR thief has a spot of bad luck in Down Among The Dead Men by Peter Lovesey (Sphere, £19.99), when the smart BMW he’s just nicked in Brighton is stopped by the cops — who find a corpse in the trunk. Seven years later he’s still in prison and still protesting his innocence.

An anonymous tip-off from within the Sussex police alleging corruption causes the case to be reopened and Detective Superintendent Peter Diamond of Bath CID reluctantly answers the call to investigate.

He finds there’s a lot more going on than a simple fitting-up, as he becomes involved with an art teacher missing from a posh girls’ school and the strange disappearances of numerous figures from the south-coast underworld.

Diamond fans will be delighted by this instalment in the long-running series, which sees Lovesey on absolutely top form.

Cathi Unsworth’s Without The Moon (Serpent’s Tail, £11.99) is a fictional retelling of the hunt for the so-called Blackout Ripper, a maniac who killed several women in London in 1942. DCI Edward Greenaway pursues his quarry through the dark and the debris, haunted by the fear that every false step he makes could mean another woman losing her life.

Meanwhile the London crime gangs, Greenaway’s pre-war adversaries, are making full use of the bombs and the blackout to fill their pockets.

A fine sense of period and place illuminates this absorbing thriller. Unsworth has skilfully distilled a large amount of research into telling details, without ever swamping the story.

Two years ago, the governor of Illinois got into a lift at the courthouse where he’d just been sentenced to 30 years in prison — and was never seen again.

Now, in The Governor’s Wife by Michael Harvey (Bloomsbury, £12.99), an anonymous client hires private eye Michael Kelly to unearth the missing politician. Money is no object, his invisible employer assures him.

But, as Kelly digs deeper into a nexus of corruption which is astonishing even by Chicago standards, staying alive might not be so easy.

Harvey’s a graceful writer, his characters are sharply defined and his plots never lead you quite where you thought they would.

As you’ll guess from the title, people vanishing are also central to Thin Air by Ann Cleeves (Pan, £7.99), in which a group of friends travel from London to attend a midsummer wedding on Unst, the most northerly inhabited island in Britain.

Overnight, in the eerie prolonged dusk of what Shetlanders call the “simmer dim,” one of the party disappears.

At every turn in their investigation, police detectives Jimmy Perez and Willow Reeves come across the local legend of Peerie Lizzie, the ghost of a drowned child, apparently seen by two of the visitors.

But can this contemporary crime really have its roots in folklore?

A bewitching setting, used superbly, and an intricate story worked out without either undue haste or any sense of dawdling, come together to create a strikingly classy whodunit.