There are no truth-in-advertising rules in publishing. While the cover of every new novel predictably declares it to be a "blockbuster", a "sizzling masterpiece", or a "dazzling gem", the truth is sometimes more mundane. Favourite authors wax and wane in their powers and, as they say in the financial advisories, "past performance is no indicator of future success".

So it was pleasing to read Simon Kernick's The Last 10 Seconds, a police procedural cocktail served with a twist of dark cynicism and a swizzle stick of dynamite. What an improvement on his previous novel, Target, which after a run of edgy thrillers featuring off-beat and sometimes corrupt cops, missed the mark by a wide margin.

Sean Egan is an undercover cop who has infiltrated a violent London gang. The job he has been recruited for is the abduction from police custody of a serial killer, dubbed the Night Creeper, who claims to have a cast-iron alibi for at least one of the murders he is accused of. By implication, there is another killer at large, desperate to protect his identity.

Detective Inspector Tina Boyd leads the team to find the Night Creeper and sets about this in her customary unorthodox and reckless manner. Egan, whose position in the gang becomes increasingly fraught, has to juggle survival with his obligations as a cop.

Steady as it goes is The Snowman, by Jo Nesbo, the fourth title featuring Oslo investigator Harry Hole (pronounced Hurler) to be translated from the Norwegian. Hole has all the characteristics of the driven cop: obsession teetering on burnout, alcoholism, a bad attitude to authority, and a failed relationship. His superiors tolerate him only because he is a superb sleuth, whose successes assist their own careers.

The plot has touches of Stephen King horror. A young boy awakes to find his mother gone, with only wet footprints down the stairs. In the garden is a snowman and round its neck is his mother's pink scarf.

Hole becomes convinced that the disappearance is linked to those of a number of women who have gone missing over the years, always during winter's first snowfall. His quest to find the killer is Scandinavian crime fiction at its best - nutritious dollops of social introspection skilfully intertwined with sheer terror.

Less impressive is Swedish author Henning Mankell's The Man from Beijing, the disjointed and sometimes pretentious latest offering from the writer who created acclaimed Ystad detective Kurt Wallander.

One can understand the burden to an author of a character like Wallander, who becomes loved by readers to the exclusion of anything new. To escape this creative straitjacket, Mankell has written several stand-alone novels that interrupt the Wallander series, which Mankell disclosed has one final title coming. Unfortunately, these stand-alones have been of variable quality, especially so his "political" novels, like Kennedy's Brain.

The Man from Beijing also disappoints. Using tediously long flashbacks, Mankell links today's murder of everyone in a Swedish village with the exploitation of Chinese forced labour in the American West a century ago. These events are woven together less as a murder mystery than a political discourse on colonial exploitation in Zimbabwe and the tensions inherent in the modern Chinese Communist elite. Yawn.

Mankell's problem is not wanting to shed Wallander, rather that he fails so dismally to do so. His new protagonist, Judge Birgitta Roslin, is Wallander in drag - she thinks, talks and behaves just like him.

In similar vein, whether it is the Ystad cop's disillusionment with modern Sweden, his truculence, or his dogged and often tangential style of investigation, Wallanderesque traits are exhibited by several characters in The Man from Beijing. Seems Mankell hasn't escaped Wallander, but has merely decanted him.

This book is available at Exclus1ves