THERE’S war between the classes and the generations in Our Holiday by Louise Candlish (HQ, £9.99). Pine Ridge is an idyllic little town on the south coast of England, but its loveliness is what’s led to its current problems.

With ever-increasing numbers of middle-aged London professionals buying second homes, there’s little hope of young locals getting their first place. And some of them are no longer willing to meekly accept the dictates of the free market.

For most of its length, this novel has the feel and pacing of a very superior beach read — lots of dangerous liaisons and shameful secrets — while the last quarter is a fast, suspenseful crime thriller. It sounds like an odd hybrid, but it really works: I was stuck to it like glue from first to last.

Fans of courtroom drama, private eye action and high-concept thrillers will all welcome the return in Witness 8 by Steve Cavanagh (Headline, £13.97) of Eddie Flynn, the professional New York conman who became a defence lawyer to keep the innocent out of prison.

As Eddie often tells us, his two trades have a great deal in common.

This time he’s defending a man accused of murdering a neighbour in their wealthy Manhattan enclave. One of Eddie’s biggest problems is that the prosecution have an eyewitness. But witness number 8 on the prosecution’s list isn’t all she seems — she’s playing her own game.

The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina inevitably attracted carpetbaggers to New Orleans and former rabbinical student Ben, protagonist of Seraphim by Joshua Perry (Melville House, £13.25) is one of them, by his own admission.

He and his legal partner Boris are public defenders, trying to keep black children out of jail in a grotesquely corrupt, racist judicial system which was irreparably broken long before the floods came.

Understanding why “a Jewish guy from a college town in Massachusetts” feels driven to undertake such soul-destroying work is as interesting as the unravelling of the peculiar crime at the heart of Ben’s latest brief.

The writing in this debut novel, by an author who previously held Ben’s job, is as sharp as broken glass. It’s philosophical, bluesy, anger-driven crime fiction at its best.

When she’s not working behind the grill at the Sandwich Shack in south London, ex-cop Hannah Abram has a sideline as a private detective. She is, she accepts, a poor judge of character, ill-mannered and unhelpfully outspoken.

In The Short-Order Detective by Liza Cody (Gatekeeper Press, £14.78), we learn that she’s no longer with the Met because she shoved her sergeant into a canal — and that she had a good reason for doing so.

Her cases in the private sector mostly involve straying dogs and straying husbands, but right now she's got two missing women and a dead body on her mind.

Widely credited with kick-starting feminist crime fiction in Britain in 1980, Cody is still reinventing the subgenre she invented, and doing it with wit, style and heart.