Make way, Jack, for the sleuth of today

Lee Child has let go of his hero, and so should we

Crime fiction fans were early adopters of the view that 2020 would be the worst year in living memory, with the announcement in January that Lee Child had retired, handing the Jack Reacher franchise over to his brother Andrew. Nine months later, The Sentinel ( Bantam, £ 20) appeared and Reacher, just when we all felt more than ever in need of his muscular decency, shed a dimension and became a zombie: he goes through the motions but he isn’t alive. Andrew Child can spin a decent yarn, but his book demonstrates how much the saga’s power stemmed from his brother’s unobtrusively perfect prose.

If you wanted white knights comfortingly vanquishing evildoers, you were better off with the ageing John Rebus, who can’t manage the stairs but is still fighting the good fight – albeit sometimes fighting dirty – in Ian Rankin’s typically compelling A Song for the Dark Times (Orion, £20). Then, in Troubled Blood ( Sphere, £ 20) there were Cormoran Strike and Robin

Ellacott, whom Robert Galbraith (aka J K Rowling) cleverly continues to portray as convincing, complex human beings even while they shine like good deeds in a naughty world. There is something rather antiseptic, however, about this investigation into a decades- old murder, and the serial killer at the heart of the book feels stitched together from bits of a dozen other psychopaths, real and imagined.

Galbraith’s 900-page novel may have the weight advantage over Denise Mina’s The Less Dead

48 MY WILD AND SLEEPLESS NIGHTS by Clover Stroud

In her electrically candid memoir, Stroud explains why, at 38, she decided to have a fifth child. Her account of childbirth is raw, elemental and beautiful.