UN HEADQUARTERS in New York is hosting yet another gathering of world leaders concerning the climate crisis, in Manhattan Down by Michael Cordy (Bantam, £16.99). And of course nothing will be done, because nothing ever is. Until everyone in Manhattan suddenly falls asleep, as does anyone who tries to enter the city.

A save-the-world group claims responsibility, promising to waken the millions of sleepers safely in exchange for real action on the environment and an irreversible taming of the finance gods. A few people in the area, for reasons later revealed, are immune to the shutdown. They have to go along with the terrorists to stay alive, but can they trust them to keep their word?

It’s a pleasingly tense and twisty techno-thriller, but what’s really striking about this book is that the authorial voice, and just about all the characters, take it for granted that the activists’ radical aims are perfectly reasonable and indeed necessary, no matter how cruel their means. There’s no-one left on Earth who opposes the abolition of billionaires, it seems, except the billionaires.

A would-be actor from London is offered the chance of her life in Sun Trap by Rachel Wolf (Head of Zeus, £9.99): a small speaking part in a Hollywood film being shot in Abu Dhabi. There are two big drawbacks, though. She’s going to have to pretend to be someone else, off set as well as on — and that’s before the suspicious deaths start. Ellie has worked so hard for this opportunity, but we only gradually realise just how hard and why. Once again Wolf proves herself a maestro of the unreliable narrator.

There are currently few series with a more enthusiastic following than Jane Casey’s books about London cops Maeve Kerrigan and Josh Derwent, combining will-they-won’t-they romance with complicated mysteries. Hardcore crime fans should be warned that the former element dominates in the twelfth instalment, The Secret Room (Hemlock Press, £9.99), but intertwined with the lives of the endlessly engaging characters is an enjoyable locked-room puzzle.

No Precious Truth (Severn House, £21.99), first in a news series by Chris Nickson, starts in 1941 in Leeds, as bombing raids replace the fear of German invasion. Police sergeant Cathy Marsden is seconded to the Special Investigation Branch which deals with deserters involved in organised crime. There’s no such thing as a female detective, of course, but the unit needs a born and bred, working-class native to supply local knowledge.

Cathy takes to the work like a natural, and tries not to think of the day the war ends and she has to go back into uniform. But the job becomes suddenly more complicated when a figure from her past turns up with a story about an escaped spy.

Nickson’s use of historical detail is just right: thorough research is lightly deployed, so that it never feels like a history lesson but at the same time you feel you know the setting intimately from the opening pages.