Killers, pooper-scoopers and mummies

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Buy Seven Up online at Amazon.co.uk

Buy The Face in the Cemetery online at Amazon.co.uk

Life is not being good to Canadian policeman John Cardinal: his wife is in hospital with severe depression and, because his superiors suspect him of snitching to organised crime, his partner is searching his bank statements for suspicious payments. And no one but he believes that the four teenagers who have gone missing from the small town of Algonquin Bay, Ontario, are all the victims of the same killer.

Giles Blunt's first novel is a highly professional tour-de-force: excellently plotted, with fleshed-out characters and a wellportrayed, interesting setting. Best of all, the victims aren't chosen according to some esoteric acrostic by Nostradamus, or because their skin is needed to bind photograph albums: serial murder here is squalid, sordid, humdrum, brutish and unpleasant - in a word, real, and hence far more disturbing than in most of its fictional embodiments.

In Seven Up, New Jersey bond-enforcement officer - aka bounty hunter - Stephanie Plum is sent to pick up Eddie DeChooch, once a hit man for the mob, now a geriatric with a sight problem whose last victim was an ironing board. As a result she's drawn into a complex imbroglio featuring, just for starters, a missing drug dealer, a pig's heart and some female mud wrestling. But Stephanie's mind is not really on the case: Max the hamster has been joined by Bob the dog, which entails much work with giant-size pooperscoopers; and why on earth has she fixed a date for a formal wedding to vice cop Joe Morelli and begun to try on wedding dresses, when she goes weak at the knees in the presence of ex-soldier-of-fortune Ranger, the darkly handsome, broodingly mysterious Cuban-American bounty hunter? Seven Up is as fizzy as its namesake, and as button-poppingly amusing as the six previous instalments of Stephanie's adventures.

The Face in the Cemetery is the latest in Michael Pearce's series of novels about Gareth Owen, the Mamur Zapt - the head of the secret police - in pre-First World War Egypt. Though, in fact, it's now 1914, the war has just begun, and Owen has the task of interning German nationals - in the process depriving the civil service of most of its efficient members. There's also the small matter of the woman's body, wrapped in bandages, found in a pit full of mummified cats, and that of the 200 army rifles, intended to arm village watchmen, which have vanished into thin air.

The Face in the Cemetery has all the characteristics of its predecessors: neat plot, original setting, and a loving portrayal of a labyrinthine bureaucracy - the whole narrated with a dry and subtle wit. And there's a walk-on part for a "little, fair-haired archaeologist, a bit of a know-all", whose identity becomes obvious when he offers to go to Mecca to talk to the Sherif.