IN MODERN-DAY Athens, a city visibly crumbling under EU occupation, there's no shortage of clients for Stratos, the ethical hitman.

He'll provide a permanent solution to your intractable problems — but only if he agrees that your target deserves removing. Yet even Stratos can't do anything about the brutal chaos resulting from the bankers' Euro "reforms."

But in the second volume in the series, Baby Blue by Pol Koutsakis (Bitter Lemon, £8.99), he can at least try to protect a blind teenage street entertainer after the murder of her journalist father.

Koutsakis successfully employs the style and soul of 1930s hardboiled US fiction in a conspiracy thriller that could hardly be more contemporary.

The Vinyl Detective makes his living tracking down rare jazz records for customers who are almost as obsessed as he is. In Andrew Cartmel's series of fun and funny capers, this turns out to be a surprisingly dangerous occupation.

In Victory Disc (Titan, £7.99), the third instalment, he's hired by the daughter of a WWII RAF band leader to gather memorabilia for the museum she plans in her late father's honour. But the Flare Path Orchestra's legacy is not as simple as it first looks, turning out to involve a wartime murder, nazi revivalists — and badgers.

Fans of Lovejoy — the TV show, rather than the books — will feel completely at home with these enjoyably disreputable characters as they bumble around the countryside bickering and unmasking baddies.

In 1880s Edinburgh, posh Inspector Frey and his proudly unrefined colleague "Nine Nails" McGray get all the strangest cases. Loch of the Dead by Oscar de Muriel (Penguin, £8.99) sees them guarding the recently acknowledged illegitimate heir of a wealthy, reclusive Highlands family.

But in a sinister house full of secrets and puzzles by a remote loch where any help is days away, they'll be lucky to emerge with their own lives.

Written in the spirit of Victorian gothic fiction, this is good spooky entertainment.

The crown colony of Singapore in 1937 is the fascinatingly novel background for The Betel Nut Tree Mystery by Ovidia Yu (Constable, £8.99).

Its narrator is Chen Su Lin, secretarial assistant in the Detective Unit, a would-be journalist and a young woman not inclined to be limited by her triple disadvantages of being the wrong sex, the wrong race and limping from childhood polio.

All senior offices in the colony, of course, are held by white men, but Su Lin has her own alternative routes of influence, no matter how she longs to escape them — her family run the island's criminal underworld.

The Detective Unit has been formed following the King's abdication, amid fears that ungrateful natives throughout the British Empire will choose this moment to rise up and also to prevent communist-inspired traitors giving aid to the Chinese, who've been invaded by Britain's noble Japanese allies. But the death of a posh foreigner at a local hotel is potentially even more disruptive.   

Great protagonist, great setting — this is a delightful book.