These 4 crime novels include one of the best of the year

BOOKS: Dark Music by David Lagercrantz (MacLehose Press/Quercus), A Heart Full of Headstones by Ian Rankin (Orion), Payback by Priscilla Holmes (Modjaji), A Song of Comfortable Chairs by Alexander McCall Smith (Little, Brown).

Here’s something fresh and unexpected: a Swedish thriller where nobody is tortured – well, okay, in the past, and mercifully offstage – and where the gore is relevant, not just thrown in for effect.