CRIME stories have been a fixture at Christmas for well over a century now, and Death Comes At Christmas (Titan, £19.99), edited by Marie O’Regan and Paul Kane, is one of the best anthologies of its type I can remember.

There’s not a single weak entry among the 18 pieces by as many authors, and several real winners, with a good variety of tone and type, from locked rooms reminiscent of the Golden Age to forensic techs wearing bloodstained paper suits.

I won’t try and pick out highlights, for fear of slighting the others, except to say that Alexandra Benedict deserves a Best Punning Title prize for The Midnight Mass Murderer. 

Louise Penny’s novels about Three Pines — that obscure Canadian hamlet “which appears on no maps” and where Chief Inspector Gamache of the Surete du Quebec makes his home — are a unique blend of the traditional village mystery with the broad-canvas thriller. The resulting mixture produces a disorientating thrill in the pit of a reader’s stomach something like the symptoms of a roller-coaster ride. 

In this year’s episode, The Grey Wolf (Hodder, £20), Gamache is plagued by a rash of minor nuisances: an unwelcome phone call, the theft of his coat, and the nagging puzzle of a piece of paper which might be part of a recipe or shopping list, but which someone clearly thinks is of great importance. 

However, once all the bits are tied together it becomes clear that the chief inspector is facing the greatest threat not only of his career, but in the whole history of his province. 

Is Three Pines as good as ever? “Oui, patron! Bien sur.”

I’m careful to give a warning there’s any hint of the paranormal in a crime novel, because I know many readers loathe such muddling of the genres. Karin Nordin’s The Man In Room Seven (HQ, £9.99) does feature a private eye who foresees his own death in a vision, but the author allows the reader to decide what that signifies.

This is the story of a mother whose search for her baby, snatched by her husband six years earlier, leads to a job at a motel, “the shittiest shithole in all of South Dakota.” One of the guests is, or maybe isn’t, the man she’s been chasing. But if so — where’s the kid? A great last-page twist crowns a tense and moving thriller.

One of Britain’s most admired crime series comes to an end with Peter Lovesey’s Against The Grain (Sphere, £12.99), the 22nd case for Detective Superintendent Peter Diamond of Bath CID. Talked into spending an off-duty week in the countryside, he prepares for a boring, smelly sojourn. But informed of a potential miscarriage of justice, Diamond realises this is his opportunity to perform a role he has never played before: that of the amateur sleuth investigating a village whodunnit. 

Peter Diamond has been a joy and a thing of wonder for 33 years, and he exits in just the same style.