AS a heatwave hits Aberdeen, DI Logan McRae has a full day ahead of him, in This House Of Burning Bones by Stuart MacBride (Macmillan, £22). A fatal arson, a racist rally and a kidnapped newspaper editor notorious for whipping up hatred against minority groups are just the main acts. McRae’s superiors are idiots and the officers at his command are, to put it politely, as eccentric as they are ineffective.

Some readers will find the formula of a laugh in every line and a crime in every chapter a little too relentless for comfort. But if you’re up for it, there’s not many authors offering more fun per page than MacBride.

We stay in Aberdeen for the latest instalment of Ben Aaronovitch’s crime/fantasy “Rivers of London” series, Stones & Sky (Orion, £20). DCI Nightingale and DS Grant, mainstays of the Met’s section for dealing with “weird bollocks,” are having a working holiday in Scotland. Naturally, it turns out to be more work than holiday when a man with gills turns up in a local mortuary.

I’m not sure this series works quite as well without London, which is usually as much a character as a setting in Aaronovitch’s work. But any disappointment on that score is minor - these stories are never less than delightful.

Two young women went missing in Indiana seven years ago and neither left any clues behind, in The Missing Half by Ashley Flowers with Alex Kiester (Constable, £9.99). The disappearances were sufficiently similar for police to link them, but beyond that no progress was ever made. Nic, whose sister was the second to vanish, has been a mess ever since. Banned from driving following a drinking conviction, friendless and alienated, she'd give anything to put it all behind her.

When the sister of the other “Missing Mishawaka Girl” ambushes her with a proposal to join forces and investigate, she very reluctantly agrees. But will discovering the truth be worth the horror of the process?

Be ready for a truly shocking ending, in a novel that only ever pauses so as to ramp up the tension.

Fiction about the end of the American Dream has no doubt existed ever since the invention of that cruel fraud, and in recent decades much of it has been written about Detroit, the former car capital of the world.

The three middle-aged sisters at the centre of Eldorado Drive by Megan Abbott (Virago, £22) were born into Motor City aristocracy but reached maturity in a harsher land, inhabiting a living memorial to the crumbling of US capitalism, weighed down by divorce, debt, booze, poisonous nostalgia and that eternal spectre of the American middle-class, the impossible medical bill.

When one of them discovers a way out — a women-only pyramid scheme dressed up in affirmative chanting and female empowerment — it’s not going to end well. For anyone.

Abbott cements her reputation as a poet of decline and regret, as well as a very fine thriller writer.