WITNESS protection doesn’t work out for murder witness Jay in Christine Poulson’s Invisible (Accent Press, £12.99). 

Thanks to a bent cop, his “safe house” in a Leicester suburb burns down on his first night there, killing his family. The trial collapses and Jay goes on the run. 

Living below the radar isn’t much of an existence until Jay makes the mistake of falling in love again. When a chance encounter puts the villains back on his trail, he has no choice but to vanish from the life of his lover Lisa. 

But she’s had enough pain in her life and she’s determined to track him down — a determination that could kill them both. 

This is a proper nerve-tingler of a suspense novel, which in less than 300 pages does what many bloated thrillers fail to achieve in 500. 

Dark Road by Ian Rankin and Mark Thomson (Orion, £12.99) is something a bit different. It’s the first play by Britain’s best-selling crime writer, devised with the artistic director of Edinburgh’s Royal Lyceum Theatre, after they both wondered why no-one writes contemporary stage thrillers any more. 

Scotland’s most senior female cop is about to retire and plans to write a memoir to supplement her pension.

Unfortunately, she was only ever involved in one case which would interest a publisher, that of a madman who killed four women in Edinburgh 25 years earlier. 

It made her career, but she’s felt uneasy about it ever since. Is it possible they got the wrong man? 

A grim story, leavened with witty dialogue, it works surprisingly well in book form, and it’s easy to see what a chiller it must be on stage.

Australia’s master of crime fiction Garry Disher gives us a distinctively Aussie version of the traditional “good cop in a bad town” tale in Bitter Wash Road (Text Publishing, £10.99). 

Hirsch was a big city detective before he became a reluctant whistle-blower against his crooked colleagues. 

Now, management think he’s corrupt but lucky, his fellow officers think he’s a grass and he’s facing life as the only resident policeman in one of South Australia’s remotest backwaters. 

But even in this sleepy exile, he continues to attract trouble. Why are his superiors so reluctant to pursue the hit-and-run killing of a local teenage good-time girl? 

A fast, gritty story is given texture by its individually crafted characters and thoroughly realised rural setting. 

Police procedural novels are at their most interesting and enjoyable when you feel you can rely on their authenticity. Lisa Cutts, author of Remember, Remember (Myriad Editions, £7.99), is a serving detective constable in Kent and takes pains to show the collective nature of major investigations, rather than the individual heroism more common in fiction. 

In a world of paperwork and budget cuts, but also of close friendships and good banter, convalescent DC Nina Foster re-opens the file on a 1964 train crash and finds it has shocking links to a recent murder. 

This is the second volume in a very promising series.