Thriller crackles with tension

TERMS OF RESTITUTION Denzil Meyrick

(Polygon, £8.99)

Meyrick can always be relied on for a punchy crime thriller, and although this is a standalone novel, set apart from his DCI Daley series, it inhabits the same dark gangland streets.

Two years after his son was murdered, Paisley gang boss Zander Finn is tracked down by his old deputy, driving ambulances in London, and is persuaded to return to Paisley, where an Albanian gang is trying to take over. There are other crews trying to muscle in too, setting the scene for a messy turf war in which Finn will need all his cunning to prevail.

Meyrick’s efforts to make Finn a more complex, multi-layered kind of a gang boss, along with a collection of strong female characters who form a tangled web of relationships with Finn’s adversaries, make for an engrossing read, though a familiar atmosphere of joyless grittiness hangs over the proceedings, crackling with tension and the inevitability of violence.

THE GREEN LADY Sue Lawrence (Contraband, £9.99)

Lawrence’s latest historical is set amidst the intrigue and ambition of the Scottish court in Elizabethan and Jacobean times, inspired by the legend that Scotland’s Lord Chancellor, Alexander Seton, starved his wife to death for failing to produce a male heir.

It’s narrated by Mary Seton – one of the “four Maries” who served as ladies-in-waiting to Mary, Queen of Scots – and

Lilias Seton, married to Alexander Seton when she was just 15. There are also flashes forward to 1980, when student Maggie Hay spends the summer at Seton’s ancestral home. She’s writing a dissertation on him, and has her own experiences of the misuse of male power.

What’s compelling about The Green Lady is also what makes it so affecting: its focus on the machinations of an aristocracy from the perspective of its women, seen only as the source of heirs and good marriages, but making the most of what little influence they had.

IMMEDIATE FAMILY Ashley Nelson Levy

(Daunt, £9.99) Having been asked to make a speech at her younger brother Danny’s wedding, an unnamed narrator prepares by reminiscing about their lives together.

She first met Danny when she was nine and travelled with her parents to Thailand to adopt him into their family.

Writing to him in the second person, she tries to make sense of their relationship, recounting his learning difficulties, the racism he faced, and his teenage phase of charging expensive items to their parents’ credit card.

There was little discussion of transracial adoption at the time, and she relates her family’s experiences to adoption narratives in literature, particularly in the tropes of Victorian novels.

But she’s putting herself under the microscope too; as it emerges that she has been struggling with infertility and is also considering adopting.

Californian author Levy was raised in a family with transracial adopted children, and she examines the issues involved with honesty and insight.