Is there any need to introduce this bestseller? More than 12 million copies of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo have been sold worldwide. Published in the UK by the MacLehose Press, the thriller was the winner of the Galaxy ‘Crime Thriller of the Year’ award in 2009 and any reader can tell you why.

Two main stories are intertwined: the troubles of Millenium magazine when one of its editors loses a libel case against the corrupt Wennerstrom industrialist and the murky history of the Vanger family.

Mikael Blomkvist, the disgraced journalist, takes a year off from his editorial role and is hired by Henrik Vanger, head of the Vanger family interests, ostensibly to write the family history. His real function is to investigate the forty-year old mystery of the disappearance of Harriet Vanger in remote Hedestad Island. Henrik is convinced that one of the dysfunctional family was the murderer, as the Island was cut off, at the time from access to the mainland.

Lisbeth Salander, the punky disturbed research aide, is the real star of the thriller. She enters into an unconventional partnership with Blomkvist and her computer-hacking skills produce spectacular revelations.

Sometimes when a novel moves from place to place and character to character, the result can be distracting, but this time it works and we follow all the thrilling threads of the story until the hunters become the hunted in an exciting climax.

Stieg Larsson’s unexpected death in 2004 meant that he never learned of the success of his novel. Fortunately for readers, he had already written the two sequels, The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest.

In One Good Turn, Kate Atkinson maintains the suspense right up to the last sentence. At first, when Jackson Brodie witnesses a road rage event that takes place in front of a crowd who are queueing for an Edinburgh festival event, he walks away.

Soon we are following the stories of a number of characters: Detective Inspector Louise Monroe, Martin Canning (the man who intervened in the road rage incident by hurling his laptop at a potential homicide perpetrator), Gloria Hatter, wife of a master criminal and a set of pink clad ‘housemaids’.

The novel is like the set of Russian dolls that plays its part in the story. Each event encapsulates others. A love story is developing between the lines too and as guns appear and disappear and murder follows murder, we wonder how Kate Atkinson will draw all the threads together. But she does in a superb concluding chapter.

Just like When Will There Be Good News, its sequel, this is a gripping crime novel.

Kate Atkinson’s very first novel Behind the Scenes at the Museum, was a prizewinner – ‘Little short of a masterpiece’ was the judgement of the Daily Mail. It was gripping from start to finish.

Her most recent novel, When Will There Be Good News, continues the detective fiction theme of Case Histories and One Good Turn, with Jackson Brodie, the former police detective, finding himself involved in a series of separate incidents. It was difficult to put this novel down – even more gripping than her first, I thought!

The first section ‘In the Past’ takes us back to the brutal murder of a family in Devon. Six-year-old Joanna is the sole survivor.

Thirty years later we learn that the psychotic killer has served his sentence and is about to be realeased. In Edinburgh, Detective Chief Inspector Monroe must inform Joanna, who has, apparently, reconstructed her life. Louise Monroe is also concerned about another dangerous psychotic who is on the loose and terrorising his wife and family.

We meet sixteen-year-old Reggie who works for Dr Monroe and has her own struggles with the criminal Edinburgh underworld and with the deaths that seem to surround her existence.

Jackson Brodie is heading north into this when his journey is fatally interrupted. The reader turns page after page wondering when there will be good news. However, the thriller is, in itself ‘Good News’. For me it was the best read this year.

The Right Attitude to Rain

Anyone who enjoys the adventures of Precious Ramotswe of the Number 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency in Botswana, should give the Isabel Dalhousie series a second look. Alexander McCall Smith invests the same honesty and charm in his well-heeled Edinburgh heroine.

In The Right Attitude to Rain, Isabel, the philosopher who is unable to keep her nose out of other people’s troubles, is involved in a number of affairs. Her niece, Cat, seems to have found yet another unsuitable boyfriend. Patrick is a workaholic and a mummy’s boy.

The millionaire American visitor seems to be the prey of his young fiancee, Angie, and we soon suspect that she is more concerned with his money than his welfare.

Isabel herself is involved in obtaining accommodation for her housekeeper, Grace, but is concerned that she has given the wrong impression to Mrs Macreadie. That gentle lady is willing to sell her flat at a lower price because she is enchanted that Isabel has come to view it with her young partner, Jamie – but he is not her lover – or is he?

Jamie was Cat’s boyfriend and she rejected him but Isabel finds herself loving him deeply. But can you have an affair with your niece’s ex-boyfriend?

The phenomenal success of all Alexander McCall Smith’s books perhaps lies in the fact that we know we will smile all the way through and that we can anticipate a happy ending.

Like all the novels in the No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series, Alexander McCall Smith’s Tea Time for the Traditionally Built is a joy to read.

Mma Ramotswe is faced with a number of troubles in this most recent novel in the series:

Her beloved little white van is reaching the end of its days and she visits Fanwell’s home, with him, in the hope that he can perform a miracle repair. Her loving husband, Mr J. L. B. Matekoni, would be sure to condemn the little van and provide a new one – but she loves her faithful van.

Mma Makutsi is out of sorts because her fiancé, Mr Phuti Radiphuti, is being pursued by Violet Sephotho, a Jezebel who has inveigled her way into selling beds in his furniture store. There is a mystery behind her astonishing success at selling beds.

The Molofololo case will bring welcome legal fees to the detective agency but Mma Ramotswe has little interest in or knowledge of football and has difficulty working out why the Kalahari Swoopers are involved in a long losing streak. It will take the wisdom of a child to solve the case.

As always, the novel is set against a background of Botswana with honest, genuine and peaceful people who love their country and celebrate its countryside and traditions – in this case the regular meetings over cups of tea. And, of course, as we know, Mma Ramotswe is ‘traditionally built’.

Michael Chabon’s detective fiction is superbly written and delightfully different. The Final Solution is a very short and entertaining murder mystery. However, it is not so much the solving of the mystery as the discovery of the whereabouts of the missing parrot that is the focus of the aged detective.

The red-tailed African grey parrot is the love of a small mute escapee from Nazi Germany. The parrot recites strings of numbers in German. When Shane is murdered, the parrot disappears. The elderly detective is soon warned off his sleuth activities by the Secret Service, who have an unexplained interest in the parrot.

He has sympathy and affection for the young boy and is determined to retrieve his pet. The penultimate chapter of the novel, when the parrot is about to be saved (or eliminated!) is delightfully told through the consciousness of the bird.

This is a gem of a short novel and the reader is challenged to understand what those strings of figures really mean. We are given a number of interpretations about what the parrot calls ‘the train song’. Don’t begin at the last page!