MICKEY HALLER, “the Lincoln Lawyer,” has had a change of venue since we last met him. He’s abandoned his criminal work for appearing in the civil courts of LA - but that doesn’t seem to mean dealing with any fewer hired hoodlums, silenced witnesses and ruthless conspiracies than before.

The Proving Ground by Michael Connelly (Orion, £22) finds Mickey suing a tech company which believes its chatbot is the next big step in AI marketing. His client’s teenage daughter was murdered by an ex-boyfriend, apparently at the urging of his AI companion. The mother wants a public admission that the product is dangerous. The company, on the other hand, wants to sell out to one of the Big Four and will do anything to stop the wrong verdict ruining the share price.

The characters and the thrills are always enjoyable in Connelly’s books, but it’s the compelling courtroom tussles that make this my favourite among all his series.

American crime-writing legend Michael Z Lewin is bilingual, having written books set in his native Midwest as well as in the West Country of Britain where he has spent much of his adult life. Are You Ready To Confess? (Gatekeeper Press, £16.99) takes him back to the US with a completely new protagonist. Lynx is an incurable risk-taker, which means he can earn a living doing odd jobs for his best friend, a private eye. Sometimes the jobs are odd enough that the respectable PI doesn’t need to hear about them.

I hope this is the beginning of a long series: Lynx and his world are funny, sad and real, and the stories he falls into are so effortlessly clever. Besides, this is probably the only invitation you’ll get this year to attend a Mob funeral for a dog.

What happens when the water runs out is the question Chief Inspector Gamache of the Surete du Quebec faces in this year’s Three Pines thriller, The Black Wolf by Louise Penny (Hodder, £10.99). The answer is unavoidable and terrifying, as Gamache and his team uncover the greatest conspiracy even they’ve ever faced.

In a series that never runs out of juice, this is, as ever, an exciting, droll and thought-provoking novel. For Star readers it contains a special fascination, as it catalogues the worst fears of liberalism under attack — not just war, tyranny and climate crisis, but populism, social media and the imagined gullibility of the common herd.

The British Library has published a handsome new hardback edition, with a beautifully evocative cover by Josephine Sumner and Mauricio Villamayor and a context-setting intro by Martin Edwards, of what many think is the finest Christmas crime novel ever written: Mystery In White by J Jefferson Farjeon (British Library Publishing, £14.99).

First published in 1937, it sees a group of stranded train travellers, during a record-breakingly snowy Christmas, take refuge in a mysteriously empty house. A more than decent plot, gloriously atmospheric and seasonal, witty and light but never empty — it is an exemplar.