I CAN generally tell a crime novel that’s written in the present tense merely by glancing at the cover from a distance of about 10 yards. 

There have always existed authors who don’t want their posh friends to know that they’re writing “genre fiction” for the lower classes and who reckon that using the present tense makes their work “literary.” 

I normally put those books straight in the Oxfam box but I do accept that one in a hundred does genuinely require what is usually a gimmick. And here it is — Kill Your Boss by Shane Kuhn (Sphere, £7.99).

Lago is a hitman with a very specialised murder-for-hire company. All its assassins are young enough to pass for interns, thus giving them close access to their high-profile targets, while at the same time rendering them effectively invisible. No-one ever notices an intern — they’re just slave labour. 

Obviously, early retirement is inevitable in such a profession and in this story Lago describes his final job as it happens, with the intention of providing guidance to the killer-kids who succeed him. Of course, that’s assuming the job doesn’t kill him first. Kuhn’s writing is cartoonishly violent, adolescently cynical — and enormous fun.

Reviewers were slightly disappointed when it was revealed that “Robert Galbraith” was actually best-selling fantasist JK Rowling, rather than a brand-new talent. 

But really that’s exactly what we’ve got, since the cases of London private eye Cormoran Strike and his temp-agency assistant Robin are about as unlike Rowling’s previous work as anything could be.

The second instalment, The Silkworm (Sphere, £20), involves the grotesquely staged murder of a widely ridiculed highbrow novelist. 

Galbraith eviscerates the literary scene with vicious gusto in a devious and well-clued mystery but once again it’s the two main characters, original and loveable, who lift the book high above the herd.

Murder is rare enough in small-town Denmark that when two women are shot dead within a short time in The Preacher by Sander Jakobsen (Sphere, £6.99) the police suspect more than coincidence. But the two victims appear to have no connection beyond the curious impression that both of them seem to have been searching for a sense of purpose in rather empty lives.

This isn’t so much a psychological thriller as a philosophical one and it’s an unusual and somewhat unsettling debut.

Secession is a timely topic, though Steve Berry’s The Lincoln Myth (Hodder, £17.99) is concerned with the US, not the Ukraine or Britain. 

The American civil war was fought on the basis of President Lincoln’s patently absurd insistence that the union between the States was perpetually binding — no state can ever legally leave the US.

But supposing secret documents, lost to history, proved that this was wrong? 

And what if a group of Mormon fundamentalists who are rich, powerful and fanatically committed to Utah’s secession were willing to do anything to get hold of those documents? 

Berry has come up with another delightfully dotty conspiracy thriller, rich in fascinating historical trivia.