Of the past refuse to be silenced

Ural Mountain remand centre when she is offered a way out.

Konstantin, who works for a secretive global power-elite, recruits her to become the perfect assassin.

A hellish year later, this young Russian woman is trained to kill without mercy for her paymasters. She is given a new life and a new name, Villanelle.

Then she crosses MI5 agent Eve Polastri. When Polastri is tasked with hunting Villanelle, her mission becomes an obsession that will put her in the crosshairs of the ruthless killer.

It may not be an original premise to have a beautiful, highly-trained female assassin working for a shadowy group of wealthy people. But this short novel works because it doesn’t take itself too seriously and the chief protagonists are interesting characters who make good foils for each other. Codename Villanelle is easy to read, exciting and fun which is probably why it is being filmed as a BBC America TV drama, Killing Eve, due out next year. THE UNQUIET DEAD

by Ausma Zehanat Khan

No Exit Press, £7.99 WHEN businessman Christopher Drayton falls to his death from a clifftop path late at night, it appears to be an accident.

Detective Rachel Getty and her boss Esa Khattak normally handle minority-sensitive cases, so Getty is surprised when Khattak takes on the case.

Then it comes to light that Drayton may have been a war criminal linked to the Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia in 1995. That would provide a murder motive for plenty of people among Canada’s community of Bosnian refugees. As they dig deeper into the life of Drayton, Getty and Khattak uncover other troubling secrets and must work out whether the horrors of war or more recent crimes have led to his death.

British-born Zehanat Khan lives in America and holds a PhD in international human rights law. An expert on the Srebrenica massacre, she opens each chapter with statements from war crimes hearings at The Hague and interweaves the narrative with stories of the ethnic cleansing and mass rapes that took place in Bosnia in the early 1990s.

If her characters are a little one-dimensional and her lengthier passages challenging to read, Zehanat Khan is to be applauded for tackling such an important subject in a police procedural.