A LABORATORY on a tidal island off the Devon coast is doing vital research into the mechanism by which viruses can jump from one species to another in An Air That Kills by Christine Poulson (Lion Hudson, £8.99). With the next major flu pandemic widely considered inevitable, this work could potentially save millions of human lives.

But there’s a problem. For some reason, staff turnover is worryingly rapid and medical researcher and reluctant whistleblower Katie Flanagan is persuaded to go undercover at the lab. She hasn’t been there long before a tragedy occurs. Coincidence, or something more sinister?

Poulson is currently unrivalled as a writer of scientific mysteries combining elements of both the thriller and the whodunnit. The world of medical research, where the pressure of big money means the temptation to “improve” your results is ever-present, makes a great setting for crime fiction.

Crime writer Francis Meadowes is tutoring a creative writing course at a lovely isolated villa in Umbria in Murder Your Darlings by Mark McCrum (Severn House, £20).

The students include an Irish republican, a retired British diplomat and a young American PhD student and when one of Meadowes’s would-be writers is found dead in horrible and suspicious circumstances he tries to untangle the motives and alibis of the rest, if only to prevent himself from being the next victim.

Those who prefer a traditional whodunnit, in which a limited pool of suspects is gradually eliminated until only the least likely remains feasible, will savour this third instalment in a piquant amateur sleuth series.

The Driftwood Girls by Mark Douglas-Home (Penguin, £8.99) is the latest investigation for Edinburgh-based Cal McGill, "the sea detective" who uses his expertise in tidal patterns to work out where bodies lost at sea are likely to come ashore.

Here, he’s looking for a missing woman, whose mother also vanished 23 years ago. He finds that the secrets of the North Sea are more easily exposed than those of people, some of whom he thought he’d known for years.

The unusual background and the layered plots make this a series for those who enjoy their puzzles dense and strange.

In The Aosawa Murders by Riku Onda (Bitter Lemon Press, £8.99) 17 people die of poisoning in a town on the Sea of Japan in the 1970s during a celebration held by a locally prominent family of doctors.

The seemingly motiveless, and almost uniquely shocking, crime is solved after a fashion when a suicide note seems to include a claim of responsibility.

But, even decades later, Inspector Teru is not the only person unsatisfied by the official verdict. Nor is he alone in looking closely at the one member of the Aosawa family to survive the massacre.

Told in the voices of various characters, through diaries, letters, reports and transcripts, this is a chilling and transfixing story.