LENA is a struggling London club singer in the 1930s in Miss Aldridge Regrets by Louise Hare (HQ, £14.99), who receives an out-of-the-blue offer to take up a potentially career-making role in New York. The timing is convenient, as she has an urgent reason to vanish from her usual haunts for a while and a first-class cabin on the Queen Mary sounds like a good spot in which to lie low.

People warn her that the US may not be a safe place for a black woman, but Lena is confident that her dark looks can pass for Mediterranean. When a murder takes place on board which has echoes of the event from which she is fleeing, it’s clear someone is setting Lena up as a scapegoat in a dynastic power play.

A golden age ocean liner is a great setting for a whodunnit, and Hare has also created a delightful central character.

Sukie is flying from London to a remote Greek island in In Deep Water by Christobel Kent (Sphere, £20.99). Accepting an invitation from an older man she hardly knows is an uncharacteristically impulsive decision, which she’s partly taken to prove that she isn’t the timid, naive, virginal child-woman of her disapproving mother’s imagination.

At the airport another woman recognises the man and, knowing what he is, can guess his intentions towards his young companion. Also acting on impulse, she follows them.

Extremely tense, at times rather distressing, this novel comes even so with an underlying uplift – the suggestion that none of us are necessarily quite as alone as we sometimes think we are.

Good Husbands by Cate Ray (September Publishing, £15.99) features three women in Bath, strangers to each other, who receive letters naming their husbands as perpetrators of a gang rape years earlier. The shattered wives must decide whether their loyalty lies with the future or the past, with the living or the dead, with their own families or with a girl they never met.

The author’s anger is infectious, and she certainly knows how to build the suspense.

It’s rare these days for a major publisher to issue a hardback collection of crime short stories by a single author, unless they’re trying to lose money as part of a tax dodge. It’s a measure of the impact that award-winning novelist Peter Lovesey has made on the short form over the last 50 years that Reader, I Buried Them And Other Stories (Sphere, £20.99) will be considered an essential purchase by readers all over the world.

Lovesey is known for his humour, his cunning plotting, and his evident joy in researching odd activities and surprising locations. Even out of context an irresistible line like “The sensible time to steal beehives is by night” is recognisably Lovesey.

The last story in the book – a monologue in verse with a twist in the final line – is a perfect example of how to experiment while remaining faithful to the “rules” of both form and genre.