WHODUNIT: JACK BATTEN

Dominic By Mark Pryor, Seventh Street, 256 pages, $15.95

A character named Dominic describes himself in Mark Pryor’s new book as “a psychopath.” He says he has “an absence of fear, an inability to love, and a total lack of empathy.” Apart from this disturbing catalogue of traits, he’s an engaging enough guy. Dominic — no surname ever revealed — is a prosecutor in the Austin, Texas, district attorney’s office, currently handling juvenile cases. A 15-year-old delinquent kid known to Dominic goes missing. When a police inspector turns up shot to death, the kid is suspected of the murder. Then, someone kills the kid. Dominic goes into action, pulling several diabolical tricks that solve the murders, simultaneously confirming Dominic’s own status as a psychopath in a clever book that has a significant number of puzzles and an equal list of tantalizing answers.

The Imam of Tawi-Tawi By Ian Hamilton Spiderline, 375 pages, $19.95

The 10th novel in the series featuring Ava Lee, the beautiful and brainy Chinese-Canadian accountant with the instincts of a sleuth, is unlike the preceding nine. In this one, Ava isn’t called on to mess in the usual complex business problems, but rather she finds herself in the unusual position of taking a swing at Trumpian political practices. The plot begins when Ava agrees, as a favour to old friends, to check on an Islamic college in the Philippines. Events move more deliberately than in earlier Ava sagas, and what our girl mainly needs to rely on for most of the narrative is her nifty talent for interrogation. Eventually, a series of sudden surprises arising out of Ava’s grilling of suspicious characters lands her in an overheated international crisis of the kind that gets the American president riled up.