IN MYCROFT and Sherlock (Titan, £17.99) by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Anna Waterhouse, rising star at the War Office Mycroft Holmes has no interest in the macabre murders taking place in London in 1872.

The victims are Chinese, so no doubt the killings have something to do with the opium trade — a distasteful business, to be sure, but one that is necessary to protect and promote Britain's interests as a trading power.

His younger brother Sherlock, however, is becoming obsessed with crime — the ghastlier the better — much to the detriment of his university studies. Mycroft feels responsible for the wayward boy, given their unfortunate family circumstances but, really! The lad is such a trial.

I'm not sure I've ever read a better "by another hand" Holmes novel. By concentrating on the days before Sherlock Holmes became Sherlock Holmes and was merely the irritating, slightly odd brother of a great mind destined for great things, the authors explore the origins of the character to an extent that Conan Doyle never attempted.

The First Prehistoric Serial Killer and Other Stories (Bitter Lemon, £8.99) collects 13 short stories by the Oxford-based Catalan crime writer, Teresa Solana.

Her detectives include a caveman who, in the course of solving three murders, invents psychological profiling and religion and a museum curator who makes an understandable error concerning an unusually foul-smelling sculpture.

These are commendably strange pieces, sardonic but in a humane way, tinged with absurdism and feminism.

In Ian Rankin's latest, In a House of Lies (Orion, £20), a private eye who disappeared years ago is found dead in an area that was supposed to have been searched at the time.

But as DI John Rebus's former protege Siobhan Clarke soon discovers, the original investigation was a dog's dinner of laziness, prejudice and incompetence, or possibly something even more sinister. Certainly, everyone involved in the old case has something to hide, including the now retired, but still infuriatingly active Rebus.

The novel is full of all the ingredients that fans of Rankin's Edinburgh-based series crave — a tangled plot, moral ambiguity forensically examined and the chance to catch up with the troubled relationships of characters who have become old friends.

There are more old friends in Frances Brody's latest Kate Shackleton mystery, A Snapshot of Murder (Piatkus, £8.99).

This long-running series about a war widow working as a private investigator in 1920s Yorkshire shows no signs of running out of steam and in this episode, Kate joins a photography club outing to Bronte country, where one particularly unlovable member of the group meets a violent end.

One aspect of Brody's writing I find particularly pleasing, along with the imaginative settings and subtle but firm social commentary, is the way she underplays her shocks. For instance, a character who readers think is completely innocent suddenly tells what we know to be a lie. Because this is quite unremarked on in the narrative, the effect can be quietly startling.