THE DARK HOURS by Amy Jordan (HQ, £16.99) features a retired detective inspector who lives in a remote Irish village and mostly keeps to herself. When she sleeps, which isn’t her forte, there’s always a torch and a golf club close at hand.

Thirty years earlier she was a young Garda in Cork involved on the periphery of the hunt for a multiple murderer, and those events have haunted her ever since. When her old boss rings, needing her help, she learns that the past isn’t over yet.

This is a nice twisty plot, but best of all is the book’s truly unusual main character — a retired cop in her 60s who’s learned a bit over the years, and unlearned bits where necessary, too; she won’t take crap from anyone, but she’s more sympathetic to them now than she was then.

Jorn Lier Horst is ex-police, and now one of Norway’s most successful crime writers. In the latest in his series about senior detective William Wisting, The Traitor (Penguin, £9.99), a landslip during a storm in Larvik turns from civil emergency to criminal mystery when all the local residents are accounted for — but there’s a dead body left over.

A detail-rich police procedural runs alongside a taut thriller. The investigator himself is refreshingly ordinary, down to earth, un-tortured, steady and decisive. Ah, but we all have our vulnerabilities, and his are obvious for any observer to see and exploit. Fans of Scandi will love it, obviously, but this is one that even non-fans will enjoy.

A remote area of New South Wales known as The Valley is a kind of natural paradise for its few inhabitants, in The Broken River by Chris Hammer (Wildfire, £9.99), but it’s a paradise without enough job opportunities to be viable as a thriving community. One false hope that arises every few years is the long defunct local goldmine: could new technology allow it to reopen?

A marvellously atmospheric epic, as well as a whodunnit and a thriller, this story of corruption, greed, guilt and courage is peopled with true-to-life characters whose struggles draw the reader in and linger in the mind long after the last page.

College dropout Marty Hench moves to San Francisco, in Picks & Shovels by Cory Doctorow (Head of Zeus, £9.99). It’s the 1980s and if you’re one of those freaks who wants to spend all their time messing around with personal computers, SF is the place to be. As with any new frontier, however, there is a Wild West element, and Marty is soon disc-deep in peril.

It’s a tribute to the quality of the writing that, as someone whose knowledge of computers begins and ends with how to switch them on, I nonetheless found this birth-of-the-pc story constantly engaging. It also works well as a gangster thriller, but the word that most comes to mind is charming: there is something very likeable about Doctorow’s story of decent people trying to do good things.