LEADING German defence lawyer Konrad Biegler takes on a strange case in The Girl Who Wasn’t There by Ferdinand von Schirach (Little Brown, £12.99).

Sebastian, a controversial photographic artist, has been charged with murdering a young woman — even though there’s no sign of a corpse — and the prosecution can’t even say who the supposedly missing woman was. Biegler begins to investigate the eccentric artist’s bizarre aristocratic childhood, looking for answers that his own client won’t give him.

Experienced crime readers will guess the solution but the route to it is beautifully written and delightfully strange.

Alison works as an accountant for a small London publisher in Christobel Kent’s The Crooked House (Sphere, £14.99).

Her life is as unnoticeable as she can make it because she doesn’t want anyone to remember who she used to be, the sole survivor of a family massacre. But then her boyfriend insists that she accompanies him to a wedding, which just happens to be in the estuary village where the atrocity happened.

Unable to get out of it without jeopardising a relationship about which she’s increasingly serious, Alison returns to her home town for the first time.

She soon finds that everything she thought she knew about her childhood is suddenly uncertain. Is it possible that the killer is still at large?

This tense, menacing thriller ends in a surprising and clever demolition of one of the genre’s most annoying plot cliches.

The US has elected a president who is too liberal to be allowed to live, which is how you can tell that The Tipping Point by JG Jurado (Weidenfeld, £12.99) is fiction.

The contractor hired to subtly get rid of him kidnaps the daughter of the neurosurgeon due to operate on the top man and issues a simple ultimatum — either your patient dies in the operating theatre or your child dies at my hands.

A terrifically exciting suspense novel, Tipping Point also makes good use of interesting incidental material concerning life in the White House and in an elite, money-driven hospital.

Even in supposedly post-nazi Berlin, the eponymous hero of The Spring of Kasper Meier by Ben Fergusson (Abacus, £7.99) has a secret that could still get him jailed, or worse.

It’s 1946 and, amid the rubble of the defeated capital, Kasper makes a precarious living trading on the black market. Trudging from one occupied zone to another, he’ll try to find anything people ask him for — including other people.

But when a young woman blackmails him into searching for the whereabouts of a British pilot, his instincts tell him that he’s getting involved in something truly awful.

A gripping story, but “place and time” are really what this superbly researched book is all about.

Completely authentic in detail and mood — and ultimately, for all its horrors, rather uplifting — this is an impressive and mature work.