IN THE early hours of a November morning in the tumultuous year of 1536, Robert Packington, a prominent merchant, and reputedly a secret agent in the anti-clerical cause, was murdered on his way to mass.

His death is still remembered by historians because it was London’s first recorded assassination by a newly invented weapon which was considered almost unimaginably diabolical — the handgun.

Packington’s killer was never identified, which allows DK Wilson to propose a convincing fictional solution to the mystery in The First Horseman (Sphere, £13.99).

Wilson creates a young protege of Packington’s who is determined, against all advice, to uncover his friend’s assassin. He thus becomes unwillingly involved in the battle that is raging for control of England, as supporters of the “new learning,” who believe that the Bible should be published in English, struggle with reactionary Catholics who are trying to turn back the clock to the days of rule by priests.

I’m glad to note that this engrossing and colourful history lesson is billed as the first in a series concerning “unsolved Tudor crimes.”

No Safe House (Orion, £16.99) is Linwood Barclay’s sequel to his 2008 bestseller No Time For Goodbye. Cynthia and her small-town Connecticut family are still trying to recover emotionally — and in their relationships with each other — from the events of that book even while their lives have outwardly returned to normal.

But then coincidence conspires with the lingering effects of the extreme measures they had to take to survive the earlier adventure, and violence and fear return to haunt them. This slightly sprawling plot isn’t one of Barclay’s neatest but it still provides plenty of thrills.

The setting for Donato Carrisi’s The Vanished Ones  (Abacus, £12.99) is an unnamed city in an unspecified country, which adds to the air of carefully crafted strangeness that pervades the whole book.

Mila is a police officer in the missing persons bureau, a posting known as limbo to those who specialise in this eerie, obsessive line of work. As one of her colleagues remarks of the way the missing take over the off-duty lives of those who investigate their fates: “I look for them everywhere. I’m always looking for them.”

And, suddenly, the missing are returning. But not as victims — as killers. Where have they been? And what do they want? Really exciting, and really unusual, this novel is a special piece of imagination.
Boston, Massachusetts bartender Bob lives a quiet, lonely existence in The Drop by Dennis Lehane (Abacus, £7.99), working under his cousin Marv at a bar owned by Chechen gangsters.

Bob and Marv used to be gangsters themselves but now they’re just hired help. When Bob accidentally adopts a mistreated dog, it brings him back to life — just in time for everything else in the cousins’ lives to go terrifyingly wrong.

Lehane’s characters and places are always authentic and this short book, brutal though it is, is in the end a story of decent people in a heartless world.