THE CUT (Little Brown, £18.99), possibly Chris Brookmyre’s most exciting and funniest thriller yet, features Millicent, who has spent 25 years in prison for murdering her lover, a charge which she still denies.

Released to live with friends of friends in Glasgow, she finds the world a strange place and her existence pointless. But a chance discovery gives just the hint of a possibility of figuring out why her boyfriend was killed.

Pre-jail, Millicent was a special effects expert working in horror films  and was the best in the business. When her path crosses that of a horror-obsessed film student and reluctant part-time burglar, the result is a dangerous chase across Europe and through the world of the video — itself a much-maligned art form, in the view of the odd-couple protagonists.

“Digressions are my passion,” admits southern Italian defence lawyer Guido Guerrieri in The Measure of Time by Gianrico Carofiglio (Bitter Lemon, £8.99).

Guido was never sure about law as a profession and now, having spent a lifetime in it, he’s less sure than ever. He takes solace from digression in literature, cinema, in life and in his own thoughts, as represented by the first-person narratives of this much-loved legal series.

In this one, he’s hired by a lover from his youth who he hasn’t seen in decades to handle the appeal of her son against a drugs-related murder conviction. The case is hard enough but reassessing his own emotional history may be even harder.

For lovers of literary crime fiction, of tense and authentic courtroom dramas and of wry, melancholy and bluesy writing, this series is unbeatable.

In The Art of the Assassin by Kevin Sullivan (Allison & Busby, £16.99), set at the end of the 19th century, Juan is a Spanish photographer who has invented a groundbreaking system for photographing crime scenes.

He is assisting the police in a case of murder in a Glasgow tenement which involves Special Branch, syndicalists and an attempt on the life of a visiting crown prince, as well as a greater crime, topical now as then — the arming of despots by British business.

This characterful and complex thriller also contains pleasures for those intrigued by early photography and turn-of-the-century theatre.

A group of students are boozing at a music pub in Cambridge in Alison Bruce’s The Moment Before Impact (Constable, £8.99) when a row breaks out.

Five of them pile into a car to head home but not all of them survive the journey and the driver, Nicci, is sent to prison.

On her release, she returns to her old haunts and an encounter with a former friend sparks a terrifying fragment of buried memory. She begins to wonder: was the crash really a tragic accident, or could it have been something more sinister? And if it was murder, has the murderer finished yet?

A conspiracy story with plenty of twists becomes a race-against-time suspense novel that belongs firmly in the “just one more chapter before I sleep” category.