PRIVATE investigator Makana is an exiled Sudanese living in Cairo in Parker Bilal’s The Burning Gates (Bloomsbury, £11.99).

The year is 2004 and Makana is hired by a well-connected local art dealer to find a notorious Ba’athist war criminal who is believed to have taken secret refuge in Egypt, accompanied by an almost unimaginably valuable art collection.

This hoard, if it truly exists, consists of pictures which were originally stolen by the nazis. It then spent years in vaults in Kuwait before being looted by the invading Iraqis.

It’s a dangerous enough job for a humble private eye at the best of times but the US’s terrorist invasion of Iraq has unleashed on the region a whole subculture of war gangsters, mercenaries, bounty hunters and sadists, all of them far beyond the control of any laws. Makana’s first priority is going to have to be survival.

Atmospheric and engrossing, this series benefits from a central character who’s easy to identify with and an author who’s well-informed and wry.

In Dead Girl Walking by Chris Brookmyre (Little Brown, £18.99) maverick investigative journalist Jack Parblane is back, but with his wings clipped after being thrown to the wolves at the Leveson inquiry.

Unemployable, and only just staying ahead of the cops who want him jailed, he’s hired by an old friend to find a missing pop star.

Tracking her across Europe, Jack finds himself treading on the deadly toes of organised crime.

This witty and action-packed thriller also provides a convincing glimpse into the unglamorous world of the touring rock band.

The title of The Whites by Harry Brandt (Bloomsbury, £12.99) refers to NYPD slang for murderers who get away with it, despite their identity being known to the police.

“Whites” are the ultimate agony for a cop, this book suggests, leaving him or her tormented with shame at having failed the victim’s family. Given what we know of the real-life NYPD, that may be a rather romantic view of their tender souls.

Still, it makes a good starting point for this first urban thriller written under Richard Price’s new pseudonym.

In it, Billy Graves is sergeant in charge of the night-shift detectives in New York City. But back in the 1990s he was part of a swaggering, unrestrained crew of young street cops who saw themselves as a clan of heroes, protecting their patch from the forces of chaos.

They’ve gone their separate ways since, some of them retired or moved to the private sector, but they still meet up for a boozy dinner once a month.

Each is haunted by their own “white” but, strangely, it seems to be only Billy who thinks something odd is going on when the “whites” begin turning up on the lists of the missing or dead.

Though effective as a thriller, this is really a rawly emotional novel about the artificial families we build for ourselves through our occupations and affiliations and of the terrible price to be paid when they fall apart.