Small town’s sordid secrets

THE GIRL IN THE FOG by Donato Carrisi (Abacus £12.99)

THIS mesmerising literary crime story is already a richly deserved sensation in Europe. It is so compelling, beautifully constructed and atmospheric that you’ll savour each word. Rome- based Carrisi superbly evokes a small town in the Italian Alps where a 16-year-old girl, Anna Lou, suddenly disappears two nights before Christmas.

Such terrible things never happen in a place like this, where everyone seems to know everyone else’s business and appears to be beyond reproach.

Enter Special Agent Vogel, who gradually uncovers the secrets hiding beneath the town’s respectable veneer.

For a start, there’s a shadowy religious group called the Brotherhood, which seems to control the town and the missing girl’s mother, as well as having strict rules about acceptable behaviour.

Meanwhile, the dapper Vogel is wonderfully drawn, a multi-faceted character who never disappoints, even when he seems to have made a mistake. Spellbinding.

MURDER AT THE MILL by M.B. Shaw (Trapeze £8.99)

M. B. SHAW is a pseudonym for British author Tilly Bagshawe, who has chosen a fresh name to launch a new detective: portrait painter Iris Grey.

Her heroine has escaped from a failing marriage and relocated to the picturepostcard village of Hazelford, living in Mill Cottage on the estate of the celebrated, and extremely wealthy, crime writer Dominic Wetherby.

Grey is invited to paint her landlord’s portrait shortly before his famous society Christmas Eve party.

Then, on Christmas Day, the youngest Wetherby son, Lorcan, discovers a body in the stream beside the Mill.

Is it an accident or a crime? So far, so Miss Marple — but Shaw has a shrewd eye for the vanities of contemporary life, and there is an acid in her voice that takes it a very long way from Agatha Christie.

NOW WE ARE DEAD by Stuart MacBride (HarperCollins £14.99)

ONE of the grittiest, and finest, exponents of Tartan Noir, MacBride here returns to one of his best characters, former DCI Roberta Steel.

She has been demoted to DS after fitting up violent local hard-man Jack Wallace, who has a penchant for attacking women.

He’s back on the streets, and Steel knows he is responsible for new attacks, but she can’t go anywhere near him or she’ll be thrown off the force.

Steel suffers humiliations as she tries to rehabilitate herself in this express train of a story that rushes towards its brutal conclusion.