The journalist Peter Temple left South Africa's hated apartheid regime in 1980 to settle in Australia, where his thrillers have netted five Ned Kelly Awards. His closely observed Melbourne, with its damp winter streets, rings with the cadence of his adopted country.

His distinctive muscular style and "the jarring impact of the language" has won him a faithful following for his Jack Irish novels.

Jack, an expert cabinet-maker, suburban solicitor and lover of the turf, is occasionally hired to find a missing person. In Dead Point (Quercus, £12.99) he is shattered when his champion horse and rider depart in "a split second of agony" in front of his eyes.

Things get worse when Robbie Colburne, the missing barman he is paid to find by powerful Justice Loder, is found dead of a drug overdose and the judge wants to know why. Caught between the decent and the politically corrupt citizens, our hero is left with barely enough time for his emerging love life.

Elizabeth George, born and raised in America, sets her literary thrillers firmly in Britain.

In her 14th novel, Careless in Red (Harper, £17.99), the well-born Superintendent Thomas Lynley tries to come to terms with his grief following the cruel and senseless murder of his wife Helen and her unborn son by a disturbed 12-year old boy, described in her earlier novels With No One As Witness and What Came Before He Shot Her.

Taking leave from New Scotland Yard, Lynley walks the long, lonely seawalk in his native Cornwall.

Down below, he sees a body sprawled on a cliff edge and is unwittingly caught up in a murder investigation as both witness and unwilling detective. Then there is the local irascible Detective Inspector Bea Hennaford, who is entangled in her own marital irrationality.

Things get even more problematic for Lynley when Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers, his "longtime partner and fractious friend", is sent from London, ostensibly to assist in the homicide inquiry.

In Careless in Red, George's complex characters, all involved in surfing in some way, flounder helplessly - including the bewildered Ben Kerne, his unfaithful wife and dysfunctional son and daughter, as well as Dairdre the vet, who hides her secrets in her cottage perched above the cove where Lynley first saw the body.

George's thrillers, which feature on TV as The Inspector Linley Mysteries, go beyond crime and its solution.

As she delves into the psychological roots of her characters, their emotional entanglements and their vengefulness, she weaves a web of betrayal and rivalry, showing how actions can stain generations for years into the future.