Missing husband and an empty bed

TWO NIGHTS IN LISBON

by Chris Pavone (Head of Zeus £16.99, 448pp) A NEW YORK book editor for 20 years before he turned his hand to writing, Pavone has become one of the most skilled creators of menace and suspense in the world. This, his fifth novel, confirms it.

Beautifully engineered as a carriage clock, it yields its nuanced secrets with insidious cunning. The story begins when not-long-married Ariel Price wakes up in Lisbon, where she’s gone with her husband on a business trip, to find he has disappeared.

Distraught, she turns to hotel security, the police and then the American Embassy to help locate him.

No one seems interested. He has only been missing a few hours. But Ariel is not convinced for a moment, and her despair turns to panic when she receives a ransom demand of ¤3 million.

She has 48 hours to find the money. How will she raise it? Inexorably a wholly unexpected truth begins to emerge from the dark shadows: it is captivating.

BAD ACTORS by Mick Herron (Baskerville £18.99, 352 pp)

THE belligerent, bellicose Jackson Lamb is without doubt the finest creation of 21stcentury spy fiction, realised in eight novels and now immortalised on television by Gary Oldman in Slow Horses.

The title refers to the washed-up group of spooks that Lamb has under his control, all of whom have been sidelined by the service for apparent incompetence.

But all of them are determined to show they can still master tradecraft and prove their worth to MI5’s ferocious boss, Diana Taverner. Here, a key Downing Street adviser has gone missing and a slow horse is asked to find her.

Meanwhile, the Prime Minister’s fearsome principal adviser — a barely disguised portrait of Dominic Cummings — is trying to bring everything secret under his control, for reasons not entirely clear.

Written with the gifted Herron’s typical wit, and with Lamb’s personality pervading every page, this is the antithesis of the discreet George Smiley.

THE ISLAND by Adrian McKinty

(Orion £12.99, 384 pp) HEATHER BAXTER has moved to Seattle and married widowed doctor Tom, who has two notquite-teenage children who are far from certain about their new stepmother.

Undeterred, when Tom is asked to address a conference in Australia, the family decide to take a dream holiday there and they are determined to explore every inch of the country.

The children are desperate to see koalas in the wild when they stumble across a remote island, which is inhabited by just one family.

The parents are warned that it could be a dangerous place to go but they want to see it for themselves, so take the ancient ferry to visit.

Tragedy strikes when Tom runs over and kills a woman on a bicycle and then tries to cover it up by hiding the body and fleeing back to the mainland. But the inhabitants have different ideas and want to take revenge.

There are echoes of the movie Deliverance in the story, but it never loses its python-like grip as gallant Heather battles to keep her new family safe — and together.