The best new crime novels (and a rule for enjoying them)

I have a rule: to ignore the prologue of a crime novel, especially if it’s printed in italics and written in the present tense. Almost always it will be violent, unnecessary and will give far too much away about coming events. I like to be unsettled. I like a story to build at its own particular rate. So, ignoring its prologue, Peter May’s Runaway (Quercus, £18.99, Spectator Bookshop, £15.99) is a well-told tale about five youths who escape from Glasgow in 1965, heading for London and fame and fortune as a pop group. Instead, they fall into a world of drugs, radical doctors, lost love and death. Fifty years later the surviving members of the group return to London to uncover the truth about a long-ago murder. The two time streams are woven together skilfully and the book ends with an intensely moving glimmer of renewed hope.

But the prologue comes from a different kind of book, a more brutal thriller.