A DECAPITATED horse is found hanging from the support tower of a Pyrenean cable car in The Frozen Dead by Bernard Minier (Mulholland, £7.99). 

Commandant Servaz is initially furious that he’s been summoned to investigate the inexplicable crime. If the horse hadn’t belonged to a leading industrialist, Servaz reckons, he’d be back in Toulouse where he belongs, investigating crimes against humans. 

But when the equine crime scene yields DNA traces from an inmate of a nearby asylum for the criminally insane, Servaz has to admit that something sinister is happening in this small town, where a ruthless campaign of long-delayed revenge has only just begun. 

Minier’s debut novel is an enjoyably mysterious and dramatic thriller, for which the cold mountains and disturbingly quiet valleys of the Pyrenees in winter make a splendidly menacing setting. 

Another police story in which atmosphere is as important as plot is Anita Nair’s A Cut-Like Wound (Bitter Lemon, £8.99) but this time we’re facing the murderous heat of Bangalore in August. 

Inspector Borei Gowda is, on the surface, a typical fictional detective — irascible, hard-drinking and self-destructively at odds with his bosses — until a surprise reunion with his first love reminds him of who he used to be in his student days. 

Perhaps that’s why, while his colleagues believe that the deaths of a few “eunuchs” are not worth wasting police resources on, Gowda is determined to protect the city’s oppressed transgender community from a self-hating murderer, no matter how many corrupt politicians he has to make enemies of in the process. 

Gowda’s first case delights — and sometimes shocks — the senses and is a very welcome addition to the still frustratingly small ration of Indian crime fiction now appearing in Britain. 

Ivo Stourton takes us to a near-future London in The Happier Dead (Solaris, £7.99), where DCI Oates struggles to make sense of the murder of an immortal. 

A British company has the monopoly, for now, on a medical breakthrough which allows the rich and powerful to be permanently rejuvenated. The Great Spa, scene of the killing, is an ultra-secure recovery centre, where the “new-young” are acclimatised to their new youth. But outside the spa’s walls the rest of us express ourselves through the traditional British medium of riot. London’s burning, and DCI Oates is up against some very vested interests. 

Stourton writes this grim but gripping story as a police procedural, rather than as science fiction, and that familiar mundanity of cops, pubs, informers and fingerprints makes his political and technological speculation all the more powerful. 

For a drop of light relief, let’s hurry to contemporary New York and The Burglar Who Counted The Spoons (Orion, £18.99), Lawrence Block’s first novel for years to feature Bernie Rhodenbarr, who subsidises his unprofitable second-hand bookshop by working nights as a burglar. 

Established fans will know what to expect — neat, suspenseful plotting, howlingly funny one-liners, irresistible characters and endlessly quotable dialogue. 

Newcomers to this marvellous series are to be greatly envied.