SHE’S got no social life, no lover, there’s a heatwave, and everybody hates the police — and now, in One By One by Sam Frances (Headline Accent, £12.99), Detective Sergeant Alice Washington of Wessex is assigned to policing a music festival.

Bad enough, even if the headliners weren’t reality-show rock band The Dolls, reuniting to mark 10 years since their lead singer was murdered by her best friend. Bad enough, before the band’s remaining members start receiving death threats.

Washington is a fine creation, shielding herself with acerbic humour out loud while internally she repeats her ever more desperate mantra “I love my job.”

Jim Kelly’s The Cambridge Siren (Allison & Busby, £9.99) takes place in autumn 1941, and the bombs are still falling on Cambridge, a university town now devoid of students but full of civil servants and evacuees.

When a dead body is found in an air raid shelter, Cambridge Borough Police, Britain’s smallest force, is clearly intended to see it as a suicide.

Detective Inspector Eden Brooke is unconvinced for several reasons. Apart from anything, why did the dead man have Brooke’s phone number written on his palm?

A story of spies and profiteers, saboteurs and sad cases, it is based, like all war-set detective stories on the principle — whether honoured in the breach or the observance — that individual lives matter even during global slaughter.

Kelly delivers a unique ambience in a historic setting that seems to contain an infinity of subtleties and surprises gradually to be revealed by this faultless series.

A Rage of Souls (Severn House, £21.99) is the eighth in Chris Nickson’s series about thief-taker Simon Westow.

It’s 1826 and Simon is following a conman named Fox who has inexplicably returned to the scene of his crime having been, just as inexplicably, pardoned while awaiting execution.

Betrayal, revenge, violent deaths and vicious threats — Simon and his team have a hard few months ahead before they finally catch up with the dangerous Mr Fox.

Meanwhile the thieftaker’s young assistants, Jane and Sally, must protect an encampment of homeless children from the sporting activities of a gang of Bullingdon-style bullies.

The period detail in Nickson’s novels seems so real and is brought in so naturally, that you feel you’re walking the streets of old Leeds alongside the ever-developing characters.

DI Shona Oliver of the Solway Firth has more than enough to keep her occupied in The Winter Dead by Lynne McEwan (Canelo Crime, £9,99), with her police work, her volunteering with the Lifeboats, and the B&B she’s running single-handedly now that her husband’s in prison.

But when she finds a bloody hammer in a neighbour’s log-pile she can’t pretend she hasn’t seen it. It looks very much as if Shona has a murder weapon — trouble is, nobody’s reported a murder.

This rural police procedural is completely satisfying in every department — plot and pacing, characterisation and setting, and most especially in the quality of the writing.