Police procedural crime fiction: The men and women that discover whodunnit

Colette McBeth's The Life I left Behind features a saga surrounding the discovery of a woman's body on the edge of Richmond Park (Paul Curran)

A policeman's lot is not a happy one, and nor is that of a policewoman, as testified by four "police procedurals" in the latest criminal stakes. Colette McBeth's The Life I left Behind (Headline, £13.99) features D.I. Victoria Rutter painstakingly untwisting a saga surrounding the discovery of a woman's body on the edge of Richmond Park. But, arrestingly enough, much of the story is told by the deceased herself, watching over developments on earth as Rutter and her colleagues race to prevent another killing.

This version of the narrative viewpoint was used by Alice Sebold in The Lovely Bones (2002). Badly written, it enjoyed temporary acclaim. McBeth's is a much better realisation of the same theme, and, psychologically, by far the more interesting accomplishment.

Meanwhile, in Manchester, PCs Andy Jones and Jeff Dean struggle with the case of a murdered girl in Mandasue Heller's Afraid (Hodder, £12.99). We begin with a depressingly clichéd "How much is that doggie in the window?" when, predictably, a dog-walker and errant pooch turn up something nasty in a drain, but thereafter there's a vivid and painful tale, seen mostly from an abused child's viewpoint. Taken from a violent home into "care", young Skye finds life almost as brutal and Heller tells a very plausible and harrowing story of how she disappears into a filthy squat and then into the clutches of a psychopath. Authority fails to catch up and protect her, while Jones and Dean are busy investigating Skye's father. It's relentlessly grim, but no one reads this addictive author for comfort. Cosy, she ain't.

Nor is life in the Aberdeenshire of Stuart MacBride's The Missing and the Dead (HarperCollins, £16.99), where Acting D.I. Logan Macrae, not wanting promotion, is happy catching petty vandals, minor drug dealers and escaped bullocks. (Note for author: a bullock is not a cow.) But a child's body is found in a quiet swimming pool, and soon Macrae is drawn back into urban savagery. It's a rough world, with a nasty castration (not of Big Business, either) and enough serious crime to make a chillingly competent female DS insist on making Macrae a full-blown D.I. This is a big, fat book, with the story unrolling over nearly 600 pages, but the multiple plots move fast and MacBride convincingly conveys the dilapidated atmosphere of the police station – surely the most realistic in this fictional survey, with its peeling walls and ancient banter.

Stuart MacBride's The Missing and the Dead is a big, fat book, with the story unrolling over nearly 600 pages

For real grisliness, we have to cross the Atlantic, where Boston's finest are practically passing the sick-bags as they deal with the case of a gutted carcase hanging from a hook, and rapidly concluding that these are human remains. Tess Gerritsen's Die Again (Bantam, £18.99) has a more original beginning than the others in this collection, starting with peculiar deaths on a Botswana safari from which only one person emerges from the bush alive. A leopard? No, a less noble alpha male is surely to blame.

Boston alternates with flashbacks of Botswana as back home Detective Jane Rizzoli and Medical Examiner Maura Isles are soon up to their elbows in enough exsanguinated intestines to satisfy the most gore-loving armchair pathologist. The mysterious death of a zoo-keeper follows, and here is an interesting view of human beings as a species of feeding animal. Without giving much away, this is excellent reading for anyone who thinks big-game hunters are the scum of the earth.

On the evidence here, the fictional cop-shop is in good shape with a younger generation taking over the canteen culture. Perhaps the lonely old soaks figuring things out all by themselves have at last had their day.