Where are the bodies buried?

HOW IT HAPPENED

by Michael Koryta (Hodder €13.60) KORYTA just keeps getting better. Here, brilliant young FBI agent Rob Barrett — who specialises in extracting confessions from those unwilling to give them — persuades Kimberley Crepeaux, a drugaddicted single mother, to give him details of two murders in which she was involved.

She even gives him the name of the man responsible and reveals where the bodies were dumped. And Barrett believes her.

The only trouble is that the corpses are not where she says. So the man she accuses of being the killer walks free.

In disgrace, Barrett is sent into exile in Montana by the FBI, but the case haunts him — for he is convinced Kimberley was telling the truth.

This beautifully drawn story,with captivating characters was inspired by a crime in Koryta’s childhood. It is impossible to put down.

SALT LANE

by William Shaw (Riverrun €16.40) A FINE police heroine emerges here. Detective Sergeant Alexandra Cupidi has been shunted out of London’s Met and down to the Kent marshes, where she is living in the shadow of the power station at Dungeness.

It is a splendid backdrop for a troubled detective, especially one with a rebellious teenage daughter who is an obsessive bird watcher.

Two dead bodies show up in quick succession: a woman is discovered in a ditch, then a man — who could have been an illegal migrant — is found drowned in a slurry pit.

Could there be a connection and is there a gang of peopletraffickers smuggling in fruit pickers to work local fields? Cupidi discovers the deep shadows that lie across the landscape of her new home.

YOU WERE GONE

by Tim Weaver (Michael Joseph €12.55) MISSING persons investigator David Raker has appeared in eight previous Weaver novels — but this outing is his most serpentine and satisfying yet.

Just after Christmas, a woman walks into a police station with no ID or mobile phone, but with a piece of paper with Raker’s name on it. She claims to be his ex-wife — even though Raker’s wife died eight years earlier.

Yet she looks exactly like his wife and knows intimate details of their life together.

The woman also claims Raker is suffering from a medical condition which means he has blacked out the fact that she didn’t die, and then produces the doctor who has been ‘treating’ him in a psychiatric hospital to prove it. Is Raker truly mentally ill? Could this woman be telling the truth?

Then, she mysteriously vanishes and the investigator becomes a prime suspect . . .