THERE are two suspects in the murder of a woman volunteering on the political campaign of a billionaire media mogul’s son. There’s the candidate himself, who was having an affair with the victim — and there’s his wife, who knew he was.

One Of Us Is Guilty by Steve Cavanagh (Headline, £16.99) is the tenth book starring New York conman turned defence lawyer Eddie Flynn, who here represents the wife, and as ever doesn’t much care how he wins the case, honestly or otherwise, as long as he succeeds in keeping an innocent woman out of prison. But with the full resources of the husband’s father mobilised against him, his victory is far from assured. Come to that, so is his survival. And the fact that his client obviously isn’t telling him the full truth doesn’t help, either.

If you haven’t got onto this series before, you’re missing out on some of the twistiest, most exciting legal thrillers for years.

The Eyewitness by Naomi Williams (Headline, £12.99) features London ophthalmologist Beth and a fascinating new patient who is regularly unable to open her eyes for 48 hours at a time. It’s a frightening condition under any circumstances, made worse because she swears that while she’s temporarily blind that she can sense an intruder in her flat.

Beth becomes far too involved in Rachel’s problems and her life. In addition to this new best friend, she also has a helpful new office assistant and an almost-boyfriend who’d do anything for her. Experienced suspense readers will suspect that at least one of these three isn’t to be trusted, but finding out which fully exercises both parts of the phrase “psychological thriller.”

Last year, mild-mannered Headingley pharmacist Idris Khan became one of crime fiction’s unlikeliest and most irresistible anti-heroes in AA Dhand’s big hit, The Chemist. In the follow-up, The Kingpin (HQ, £16.99), Idris is still in schtuck. A favour for a friend took him across a legal and moral line and there’s no going back to who he was. He’s trying to be a saviour, but is he turning into a monster?

Dhand blends cunning murder methods worthy of Golden Age whodunnits with breathtaking action.

DS Lucy Golden fears she is involuntarily coming to the end of her Garda career, in The Taken by Martina Murphy (Constable, £16.99), but there’s one case she’s determined to solve before she goes. Fourteen years ago two children were reported kidnapped in Dublin. Lucy’s failure to find either haunts her, but now the DNA of one of them has turned up, fresh, at the scene of a robbery. If this is a second chance, she can’t miss it again.

The best police procedural novels contain plenty of realistic investigative work, coupled with a squad of detectives that the reader comes to know as individuals and as a collective. The best authors add wit and charm to that mixture, and not many do all of the above as well as Murphy does.