THE last surviving boss of one of Scotland’s premier crime families says he’s ready to do a deal, in The Devil You Know by Neil Lancaster (HQ, £16.99) — the location of a body from a long unsolved murder in exchange for transfer to a safer prison.

But DS Max Craigie and his colleagues in the Fife-based anti-corruption unit know there must be more to this than meets the eye: no Hardie ever helps the polis — that rule is part of their DNA. Can Max find out what he’s up to in time to stop it?

Endearingly eccentric characters, tense action and lots of lovely, authentic detail for the procedure fan explain why this series is rapidly picking up readers.

No relation to the above is The Devil’s Playground by Craig Russell (Constable, £9.99), a gothic thriller set in 1920s Hollywood, just months before the first big talking pictures make half the town’s talent redundant overnight. 

When Mary, a studio fixer, is called to the scene of a film star’s suicide, her job is to protect her boss from scandal. But she should know better than anyone that in a town built on illusions nothing is ever what it seems.

This is an irresistibly atmospheric and mysterious recreation of an extraordinary moment in cultural history.

Two well-known US creatives (she’s crime, he’s comics) team up for The Murder Of Mr Ma by John Shen Yen Nee and SJ Rozan (Titan, £9.99). It’s a diverting and fresh combination of a whodunnit with a swashbuckling romp through London’s Chinese communities in the 1920s. 

Their literary influences are proudly on display: the Sherlock Holmes stories and the British penny dreadfuls of the 19th century, alongside the 16th and 17th century “crime-case” fiction of China. There’s more than a hint of the earliest adventures of The Batman, too. 

Fictionalised versions of historical figures, from both east and west, also abound as a young Chinese academic becomes involved in something way outside his normal quiet life — an investigation into the killings of a number of Chinese men who settled in London after serving the allies in the great war. 

There are fewer Chinese characters in The Many Lies Of Veronica Hawkins by Kristina Perez (Constable, £20), despite it being set in Hong Kong. And that is one of the points of this many-layered novel with its themes of colonialism, class and identity. 

It centres on Martina, a struggling magazine writer from New York, just arrived in post-handover “Hongkers” with her banker husband. It’s the only place still hiring after the 2008 crash. She fears she will remain an outsider in this strange new home just as she has been everywhere else in her life. But, almost unbelievably, she is taken up by one of Hong Kong’s most powerful and glamorous taipans. Perhaps here, with her new best friend, Martina can finally make herself into someone real?

A murder mystery that grips all the way is built on a colourfully detailed account of ex-pat life.