TERRORISM is nasty. But if you want to really blow up the world you use banks, not bombs.

That’s the provocative premise behind Observer journalist Jamie Doward’s spy thriller Toxic (Constable, £19.99).

In it, a senior banker’s mutilated body washes up on a Kentish beach. The murdered man worked for a bank which MI5 financial analyst Kate suspects of being a front for the CIA. Meanwhile, there are rumours of a terrorist plan to trigger a meltdown on the financial markets.

The question Kate wrestles with is, how far would the CIA go to protect itself against its own errors?

Of course the idea of MI5 spending a single penny of its vast budget on preventing terror instead of harassing law-abiding dissidents is absurd. But if you can ignore that, this is a very promising debut.

A south-London child is missing, in The Shut Eye by Belinda Bauer (Bantam, £14.99), and DCI Marvel — usually a cop of very few human emotions other than irritation — can’t let the case go.

Even when he’s shifted to other investigations, they keep intersecting with the vanished girl around the figure of a local psychic.

Bauer’s writing is invigorating — it’s full of surprises, with some guffawingly funny dialogue and some piteous psychological horror.

Be warned that not quite all is resolved at the end of the story, in a way which might grate with crime fiction purists.

Dave, a London “chugger” and resting actor, doesn’t actually set out to be a serial-killing cyber-avenger in Haterz by James Goss (Solaris, £7.99).

It’s just that there are a lot of awful people online — racists, misogynists, liars and frauds — and someone’s got to sort them out.

But is Dave really in charge of his accidental crusade or is he being manipulated by people even worse than the ones he targets?

The internet is still new enough for us to be shocked by its dark side and even to see its evils as unique, in the same way that our ancestors felt when movable type, the novel and photography were invented.

To the next generation, Goss’s satire may seem quaint. But right now it’s very funny and merciless to those who deserve no mercy — and it’s quite likely to put you off using social media for life.

The Case of the Hail Mary Celeste by Malcolm Pryce (Bloomsbury, £12.99), set in winter 1947, sees Britain’s railway companies in their final days before nationalisation.

Jack Wenlock, last survivor of a secretive corps of detectives who’ve been raised as orphans to serve the Great Western Railway as if it were their god, fears that his services will no longer be required once “the common man” takes ownership.

But as it turns out, there is one final case for Jack to solve and in doing so he will shatter his own world forever.
Wildly funny, admirably eccentric and warm and humane, this sumptuously detailed book is also strangely topical in its reminder of the contempt and indifference with which our rulers have always viewed us.