Heresy S. J. Parris (HarperCollins, £7.99) Stephanie Merritt assumed a pseudonym to write this romp through the history of Elizabethan Oxford. It’s a detective story, the sleuth being Italian monk Giordano Bruno, who did really flee to Oxford to escape the Inquisition. In Heresy, he is discovered on the privy reading Erasmus, pondering how to elaborate his Copernican theory that the earth revolves around the sun, and not vice versa. Escaping to England, he becomes a spy for Queen Elizabeth, tasked with rooting out the remnants of papacy from Oxford colleges. Then one of the Fellows is found dead, savaged by a starving hunting dog. A rumbustious story, well researched and full of little in-jokes.

The Betrayal Helen Dunmore (Penguin, £7.99) Another historical novel, this time set in post-war Leningrad. It is the sequel to Dunmore’s earlier novel, The Siege, and tells the story of Anna, her brother Kolya and doctor husband Andrei. Still in the same flat, their lives are put in jeopardy when the chief of secret police’s son is admitted to Andrei’s hospital. The strong narrative and authentic setting keep the reader glued as the story unfolds. Despite the grim background of Stalin’s rule, Dunmore allows herself a few in-jokes. One diktat makes its way to Anna’s nursery school — the teachers are told to mark the children’s drawings. “Every single one’s got to be graded and put in a file so we can do a progress assessment every six months.”

The Detective Branch Andrew Pepper (Phoenix, £7.99) Pepper’s detective, Pyke, is in the newly formed Detective Bureau of the Metropolitan Police. It is 1843, and Pyke has a secret past which has given him good connections in London’s seething underworld. Three men are killed in a robbery at a pawnbrokers, and it takes Pyke all his guile to unravel the mystery. This is the fifth in an elegantly written series (Pepper is an English lecturer at Queen’s University, Belfast), with each episode serving to round out the back-story of Pyke’s complex character.