A pint of lager, a decent curry, and a word with Chingford CID

It Was an Accident by Jeremy Cameron Touchstone, pounds 14.99 My Ride with Gus by Charles Carillo Sceptre, pounds 8.99 By Desire by Sam North Secker, pounds 12.99

For football clubs and publishers alike, these are, traditionally, eventless weeks. But just as a teenage hopeful may score a hat trick in the friendly against Sligo Rovers, lesser-known authors can seize the opportunity of summer publication to claim a little attention while Booker contenders await the start of the season proper.

At least, that's what I assume Jeremy Cameron's publishers were thinking when they decided to bring out his wonderful thriller, It Was An Accident, at a time when received wisdom has it that the only customers in bookshops are young foreigners looking for EFL dictionaries. But Cameron is no trialist - his previous novel, Vinnie Got Blown Away, rightly earned plaudits from a variety of sources, ranging from critics in the FT and Daily Telegraph to one Razor Smith, resident of HM Prison High Down, and this sequel is an absolute cracker as well.

It Was An Accident is a tale of conspiracy, violence, villainy and deckchairs, told by Nicky Burkett, a young crim fresh out of Wandsworth where he has served a four-year sentence for manslaughter. Ambitious for lager, sex and a decent curry, Nicky finds that much more awaits him back in Walthamstow - his pals have set him up in a flat, beautiful Noreen sounds on for it, and his former cellmate wants him to front a scam in Jamaica, exporting coffee and importing deckchairs. Sadly for Nicky, but to the great benefit of the novel, these turn out to offer only a silver lining to the large dark cloud that seems to be following him around. Trouble appears, first of all in the shape of Chingford CID, keen to enlist his unofficial and possible murderous help in their enquiries into the killing of one of their colleagues and the vicious assault of a business acquaintance of Nicky's. Soon, Noreen and Nicky have also been dispatched to hospital by thugs employed by a local car dealer whose only claims to respectability are a camel coat and a seat in the director's box at Leyton Orient.

In a mood to quibble, I might just venture that the plot is merely pretty good and that Nicky's Jamaican trip is a little too extended, but any tiny doubts are dispelled by the superb narrative voice - north London streetspeak, so convincingly done that it makes the residents of Albert Square sound like Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins. The result is, as Nicky might say, a result.

The getting of street wisdom is also the subject of another mightily enjoyablesecond novel - Charles Carillo's My Ride With Gus. Trouble hits Carillo's klutzy hero, Jimmy Gambar, on New Year's Eve after his proposed proposal to his ghastly fiancee goes askew. Jimmy takes nerdy refuge in a nightclub, a girl follows him back to his fashionable SoHo loft, a fracas ensues and she, awkwardly for Jimmy, dies. Jimmy has only one option - he calls his estranged brother, Gus.

With a corpse in the boot, the brothers set off through Brooklyn and into a past which Jimmy has tried to disown. In the subsequent capers, Jimmy finds himself in a storyline reminiscent of After Hours, with Gus, a Mr Fix-it for the Mafia, coming across like Harvey Keitel's Mr Wolf in Pulp Fiction. If there is also a trace of a downmarket TV-movie hugginess as the plot progresses, that is more than compensated for by the continuing suspense and snappy, wisecracking dialogue. Another summer hit.

Strange to tell, and try though I might, I can't find fault with a third novel published in these dog days. Sam North's By Desire is similarly set on a significant day, in this case 14 February. This is the rather inappropriate date that Larry Azure, singer-entertainer- barman at an Irish pub in Kentish Town, has decided to ditch his mistress, the pneumatic (and pregnant) barmaid Laura, and remain faithful to his wife.

Larry's attempt to clean up his life is authentically shambolic, littered with delusions, selfishness and stupidity, and North makes the most of it. His strategy of detailing the interior monologues of Laura and Larry is particularly effective in showing, rather than telling, the dire consequences of their misunderstandings - as when Laura asks, "Now can I make you talk to me?" and Larry drags her off to the pub basement, ties her hands behind her back and prepares for one of their old specialities of brutal sex, having wishfully mis-heard her question as "Now can I make you torture me?"

The cross-purposes and Larry's awful mistakes accumulate to make this a novel guaranteed to have its readers cringing and, by the end, squirming in dismay. This is a terrific performance by a fine writer. His publishers may not have done Sam North any favours with summer publication - but at least they delayed the appearance of this harrowingly cynical account of love and lust until long after Saint Valentine's Day.