SET amid Thomas Sankara’s socialist revolution in Burkina Faso, American Spy by Lauren Wilkinson (Dialogue Books, £14.99) is a most unusual espionage story.

[[{"fid":"14789","view_mode":"inlineright","fields":{"format":"inlineright","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false},"link_text":null,"type":"media","field_deltas":{"1":{"format":"inlineright","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false}},"attributes":{"class":"media-element file-inlineright","data-delta":"1"}}]]Marie, its heroine, is a rarity — a black woman working in US intelligence in the 1980s. She’s desperate to undertake real work rather than the condescending scraps she’s thrown in the Ivy League world of the Feds and, as a child of the cold war, happy to do her bit against the spectre of communism.

Her sex and race make her the obvious choice to infiltrate Sankara’s inner circle. But, having done so, she finds he’s not only charismatic and sincere but achieving real progress in his fight against poverty and misogyny.

All spy fiction tends to be about themes of identity and of passing for something you aren’t but, for obvious reasons, this is more so than most.

An exciting historical thriller is combined with a novel about whether a black woman can be a “good American” as well as true to herself.

Passing as one of the boys, of course, is a method many women feel forced to adopt in workplaces ruled by men.

In Whisper Network by Chandler Baker (Sphere, £14.99), a notorious sexual harasser is about to be made CEO of one of Dallas’s biggest companies. Three women on his staff decide that years of not making a fuss and complaining only to each other hasn’t worked.

[[{"fid":"14790","view_mode":"inlineright","fields":{"format":"inlineright","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false},"link_text":null,"type":"media","field_deltas":{"2":{"format":"inlineright","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false}},"attributes":{"class":"media-element file-inlineright","data-delta":"2"}}]]But when they decide it’s time for action, the consequences are unimaginable.

Through effervescent dialogue and shocking twists, Baker explores what happens when women stick up for each other — and when they don’t.

The protagonists, with their pampered lives of personal trainers, nannies and huge salaries, aren’t automatically sympathetic characters but that perhaps is part of the author’s point — bad things don’t only happen to good people.

Rebecca Alexander’s A Shroud Of Leaves (Titan, £8.99) is the second in the series featuring Sage Westfield, now training as a forensic archaeologist.

[[{"fid":"14791","view_mode":"inlineright","fields":{"format":"inlineright","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false},"link_text":null,"type":"media","field_deltas":{"3":{"format":"inlineright","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false}},"attributes":{"class":"media-element file-inlineright","data-delta":"3"}}]]When the body of a missing teenager is found in the grounds of a run-down stately home in the New Forest, his unsettling job is to gather evidence from interpreting the remains and the burial itself.

The police investigation is taking place in the knowledge that this same house and its eccentric inhabitants were linked to another, but unsolved, disappearance two decades earlier. The investigative details of this little-known forensic speciality make for a truly unusual and fascinating mystery story.

Suburban school secretary Georgie heads to London for a girls’ night out in A Secret Life by Christobel Kent (Sphere, £18.99).

[[{"fid":"14792","view_mode":"inlineright","fields":{"format":"inlineright","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false},"link_text":null,"type":"media","field_deltas":{"4":{"format":"inlineright","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false}},"attributes":{"class":"media-element file-inlineright","data-delta":"4"}}]]She’s nervous because it’s not the sort of thing she does these days and it’s certainly not the sort of thing her controlling husband usually approves of.

When she wakes the next morning with bruises and fragmentary memories, she knows she’s in trouble — she just can’t work out what sort.

This creepy, compelling suspenser has the reader constantly screaming at Georgie to open her naive eyes to what’s happening around her.