Like the hot and noisy city around him, Minami himself is a man on the brink of ruin. He shares its corruption, its brutality and its despair: in Peace’s Tokyo, everyone is guilty. The book’s intensity derives partly from the unrelieved grimness of its subject-matter and partly from its staccato, first-person, present-tense narrative. Dark and relentless, Tokyo Year Zero is not for the faint-hearted but it’s a considerable achievement.

In Beneath the Bleeding (HarperCollins, £17.99), Val McDermid returns to the Yorkshire city of Bradfield, the professional stamping ground of her series characters DCI Carol Jordan and criminal profiler Dr Tony Hill. The novel opens explosively with an incident at a secure hospital that leaves one man dead and Hill with a shattered leg. The momentum doesn’t slacken: someone poisons Bradfield’s star footballer with ricin. A bomb rips into the crowd at the football stadium, causing carnage. Jordan’s life is complicated still more by the arrival of a squad of heavy-handed intelligence officers, convinced that the bomb is the work of terrorists. Hill’s attempts to help from his hospital bed are marred when he is reunited with the mother from hell.

This is a book that works on more than one level. It fulfils the criteria of a very good contemporary crime thriller in terms of excitement, topicality and its sense of authenticity. But it delivers more than this: the complex and unpredictable relationship between Hill and Jordan lies at the heart of the series and is one of its greatest strengths. McDermid’s writing gets better and better.

Not in the Flesh (Hutchinson, £17.99) is the latest title in Ruth Rendell’s long-running Wexford series set in the Sussex town of Kingsmarkham and its hinterland. A truffle-hunting dog digs up the remains of a human hand in an abandoned garden. The rest of an 11-year-old corpse soon follows. Another body waits to be discovered in the house nearby. Chief Inspector Wexford, who is feeling his age and wishes his subordinates wouldn’t keep calling him ‘guv’, picks his way through a complicated case involving a dying author and his wives, a disgruntled builder, a fruit-picking poet and a large supporting cast. Another strand of the plot deals with the town’s Somali community; the problems of cultural integration are one of Rendell’s recurring themes.