HARLAN Coben has the Midas touch at the moment. He can do no wrong. His previous stand-alone thrillers, Tell No One and Gone For Good, turned him from middle-of-the-road writer to international best seller.

No Second Chance (Orion, £12.99) is his best so far, and catapults him to the top of the crime-writing premier league.

The story revolves around popular surgeon Marc Seidman, who awakens to find himself in hospital, hooked up to an IV, his head swathed in bandages.

Twelve days earlier he was shot in his quiet suburban home by an unknown gunman. His wife was shot dead, and his six-month-old baby daughter, Tara, abducted.

Just when he starts to fear that his daughter is lost for good, he receives a chilling ransom note: if you contact the authorities, you will never see your daughter again; there will be no second chance.

Marc is torn between going to the FBI, or going it alone. He doesn't know who he can trust. And soon the authorities have found a new suspect - Marc himself.

No Second Chance is a roller-coaster of a ride. Don't wait for the paperback version, read it now!

After four dark and disturbing novels featuring private detective Charlie Parker, John Connolly has given his leading man a rest.

In Bad Men (Hodder & Stoughton, £14.99), the action is set on Dutch Island, off the coast of Maine, once known as Sanctuary where, in 1693, the settlers were betrayed to their enemies and slaughtered.

There have been 300 years of peace on the island, until now.

Men, Bad Men, are coming to the island to kill the wife and son of their evil leader, Moloch, and retrieve the money she stole from him.

Standing in their way is the island's police officer, 'Melancholy' Joe Dupree, a man who knows the island's secrets, rookie cop, Sharon Macy, and the ghosts of the settlers who rise up to protect their island.

The body count is high, very high - and even higher when you take the ghosts into account.

Connolly admits that some readers have been disappointed that Bad Men is not a "Charlie Parker book."

Writing on his website - www.johnconnolly.co.uk - he says: "I wanted to write something just a little different: something that moved a little faster, that was written in the third person, and that allowed me to push the combination of crime and the supernatural as far as it would go. I wanted to experiment a bit, so that I could apply what I learned to later books."

If you like Stephen King and John Saul then you'll like this, but it's a pale shadow of Connolly's earlier books such as Every Dead Thing and Dark Hollow.

Parker fans can take comfort in the knowledge that the private eye, and his gay hit men friends, Angel and Louis, will return in 2005.

Former tabloid journalist Val McDermid has become one of Britain's leading crime writers. Her novels featuring psychologist Tony Hill were made into the TV series Wire In The Blood starring Robson Green.

But it is her stand-alone novels such as A Place Of Execution and her latest, The Distant Echo (HarperCollins, £17.99), that demand most respect.

The new novel is set in her native Scotland, in the university town of St Andrews to be precise.

Four students, staggering home from a Christmas party, stumble across the body of a barmaid, Rosie Duff, who had been raped, stabbed and left for dead.

The only suspects are the students stained with her blood and no one is charged with the murder.

Twenty-five years later, Fife police mount a cold case review and among the unsolved murders they are examining is that of Rosie Duff.

But someone else has their own idea of how justice should be done. One of the original suspects dies in a suspicious house fire; a second is killed in what looks like a burglary gone wrong.

Surviving student Alex Gilbey fears he could be next. He believes the only way to save his skin is to uncover who really killed Rosie Duff.

The Distant Echo has an atmosphere as charged as an electric storm. A gripping tale.

Another great read from a British author is Nothing Like The Night (Michael Joseph, £9.99) by David Lawrence.

Detective Sergeant Stella Mooney and her team are hunting a killer who is preying on young women in the Notting Hill area of London.

The killings are brutal, the victims slashed more than 50 times.

But what is more shocking is that two people are involved, and the dominant one is a woman.

Updated: 09:17 Wednesday, July 02, 2003