A.N. Wilson recommends crime fiction that will rob you of sleep

Val McDermid is the best crime writer at work in Britain, and How The Dead Speak (Little, Brown, £18.99; Tablet price £17.09) is proof of that. Why are her books unputdownable? The pacing of the plots, their complex ingenuity, yes. But also the fact that these are books about completely convincing, sympathetically drawn people – both the cops and the rest. In the grounds of a former convent in a northern town, building work has excavated heaps of child corpses. We’ll learn some of what these poor little mites suffered at the hands of sadist nuns. But there are other bones, of more recent ­vintage, found there – those of young men. We need the police psychologist to give us the profile of the psycho behind these murders; but our old friend Tony Hill (as readers of the last book in the series know) is behind bars for a murder he did not commit, and Carol Jordan, his sidekick in the force, is now an ex-copper suffering from PTSD. We still see a lot of them in these pages, but meanwhile the gruesome mystery is unravelled by Carol’s old colleagues. Catholic readers will perhaps be especially disturbed by this story in which a former Reverend Mother and a heartless priest attempt to cover up their appalling past.