The Outsider by Jane Casey; White City by Dominic Nolan; The Sequel by Jean Hanff Korelitz; The Fate of Mary Rose by Caroline Blackwood; Ink Ribbon Red by Alex Pavesi

The Outsider by Jane Casey (Hemlock, £8.99)
Tangentially related to Casey’s series featuring police officers Maeve Kerrigan and Josh Derwent, The Outsider focuses on Maeve’s former lover, the undercover police officer Rob Langton. When his prompt action helps to save the life of the crime boss he is tailing, Rob finds himself at the heart of a notorious criminal family. Patriarch Geraint Carter likes to keep people close, and his luxurious country mansion is inhabited by his adult children and their spouses, as well as senior staff members. It’s a macho world where the women, particularly the cowering wife of Geraint’s violent cokehead son Bruno, are essentially captives, and where Rob must continually prove his loyalty. This becomes increasingly difficult when Geraint joins forces with powerful rightwing conspirators intent on stirring up anti-immigrant sentiment by causing carnage in a public place – and the more Rob knows, the more danger he’s in if he’s rumbled … Pacy, gripping and tightly plotted, this book works both as a standalone and as a way into Casey’s excellent series.

White City by Dominic Nolan (Headline, £20)
Dog-whistle politics and undercover policing were quite as dangerous in 1952 as they are today, as Dave Lander, who reports to the flying squad while working for the gangster Billy Hill, discovers when he becomes embroiled in the latter’s plot to rob a mailvan in the West End. The “Eastcastle Street job” actually took place – the stolen money, which would be worth about £10m today, was never recovered, and nobody was ever charged – as did the Notting Hill race riots of 1958, which form the background to the book’s second half. Billy Hill, like many of the characters in this superb evocation of a postwar London struggling to emerge from the ruins, really existed. The slum landlord Peter Rachman, socialite Lady Docker, crime reporter Duncan Webb and many more rub shoulders with the invented characters as Nolan deftly intertwines Lander’s narrative with that of Addie, whose Jamaican postman father goes missing after the heist, and disillusioned Notting Dale-dweller Claire, whose husband disappears at the same time.