Jan Lee enjoys three crime novels, each latent with anguish

Cotswold crime writer helps solve real-life mystery" is how the gentle but persistent Melissa Craig describes herself in The Man at the Window (Hodder, 16.99). She would like to devote herself to completing her novel but cannot resist probing and piecing together the events leading up to the drowning of a young girl who set off through the woods to deliver eggs to an eccentric old man. Did she witness something awful in his isolated cottage? Why did she leave the lonely track on her way home?

Melissa feels sure Graham, her new neighbour and prime suspect, is innocent despite the cloud that hangs over his past as a teacher. Miss Marple-like, she misses nothing that goes on in her village.

The local police inspector respects her but views the case as routine, her journalist friend sees it as news. Betty Rowland's career was launched when she won the Sunday Express/Veuve Clicquot Crime Short Story of the Year Competition. Seven novels followed with the village sleuth as "something of a crusader" who cannot resist "other folks' troubles". Her smooth mysteries, astute characterisation and good local colour, are engaging and sensitive.

Black humour stalks Marian Babson's latest, A Tealeaf in the Mouse (Constable, 16.99). Young Robin's mum has extended her honeymoon with her new husband so he is sent to his aunt. If that is not bad enough the local gang will only accept him if he steals Mrs Nordling's prize possession.

Terrified of heights, he forces himself up on to the garage roof, into the house where he grabs the cat. Stealthily, he is making his way back to the open window when he witnesses a horrific killing. Now the murderous Mr Nordling is on his trail. There is only one place to hide the priceless cat in his bedroom, but for how long can he keep the animal safe from the mad Mr Nordling, his sister and her frenetic boyfriend Josh, a local radio presenter? Babson's naive style smacks of Adrian Mole with a feline twist; she brings to her gripping cat-and-mouse tale a touch of hysteria and a heady mixture of humour and cruelty.

With his unstable emotional and psychological background does Robbie have the moral fibre to be an officer in the Flying Squad with the Metropolitan police? The force doesn't know that, as a kid, he was "all gunned out" . Even his wife knows nothing of his past.

Released from prison, his father still lurks in the sordid tenements of the Gorbals; his uncle had his hands chopped off in a terrible revenge.

Above all, he is haunted by the terrible disappearance of his beloved brother Tam all those years ago. The Long Close Call (Hodder, 10) opens with a gripping bank raid which goes horribly wrong.

To save his superior officer, Robbie shoots dead one of the criminals and, unbeknown to the police, the family of the dead man has marked him down. Then his mate is shot and Robbie is in the frame. His wife, too, loses faith in him.

There are only two people to whom he can turn: his father and the policeman who searched for Tam, loved his mother and cared for him like a son. J Wallis Martin skilfully interdigitates the adult and the young Robbie. The two stories hinge on one another. The sordid smells and sights of the past seep into the present. Themes recur: two mafia-like dysfunctional families, father and son alternating between hunter and hunted, vulnerable and complex children at risk and two women who risk all for their threatened love. Like Reginald Hill, she brings compassion and tension to a thriller that grips from the first page.

**This article first appeared in The Oxford Times Weekend section, May 5