Between Two Evils ★★★★★ Eva Dolan, Bloomsbury

The murder of a young doctor in a pretty Cambridgeshire village sounds like the beginning of a Miss Marple mystery. It is anything but. The dead doctor in question worked at a detention centre for women who, no matter how British they might consider themselves, lack the necessary documentation to remain in the country. They are imprisoned in a grim, secretive holding pen to await deportation to their places of origin. The murder is investigated by Detective Sergeant Ferreira and Detective Inspector Zigic, both of nonBritish ancestry. The plot is fiendishly twisted, the characters palpably real and complex and, on top of that, this is one of the first novels to expose the pain and misery that Brexit policies bring down on ordinary people who have lived their whole lives in the UK only to find they are undesirable aliens.