In Death Sentences, veteran editor Otto Penzler collects 15 novellas from some of crime fiction's biggest talents, each concerned with the intersection of crime and literature.

These "Bibliomysteries" were sold individually and exclusively through Penzler's New York-based Mysterious Bookshop, but are now collected in a single, handsome hardback edition with a foreword by Ian Rankin.

Some are well written but feel a little too much like standard mystery stories with a tacked-on theme, while others, such as John Connolly's surreal and quite brilliant The Caxton Lending Library & Book Depository, joyfully embrace the literary theme in unusual ways. It's fair to say that Connolly's contribution - concerning a library where literary characters live beyond the page - is the most original approach.

Laura Lippman's The Book Thing is another standout, a surprisingly heart-warming tale that highlights a real-life Baltimore institution, while Ken Bruen's The Book Of Virtue reminds the reader how much power a writer can pack into just a few words.

Several stories deal with the Second World War and the Holocaust. Of these, Peter Blauner's The Final Testament is notable for its unexpected convergence with history, while Reed Farrel Coleman's The Book Of Ghosts is a hugely affecting, cleverly constructed and memorable affair about how a legend can grow in unforeseen ways. Throw in a previously unpublished Mickey Spillane story (finished by Max Allan Collins) and a welcome appearance from a certain Lieutenant Columbo written by his co-creator, William Link, and you have one of the finest multi-author collections in a long time.

The protagonist of Sam Millar's latest novel, Black Creek, is also something of a bibliophile, although being a teenager, his preferred reading matter is comic books. But the four-colour world of Marvel and DC is soon diminished after the suicide of a friend. Tommy and his gang swear vengeance for their friend, but this act of solidarity has far-reaching consequences. Tommy soon discovers the dark secrets of his small town, and is forced to make a terrifying choice that will affect him for the rest of his life.

Millar's straightforward style is readable, although some of the dialogue is perhaps a little too functional. The book is very much a non-supernatural relative of mid-period Stephen King novels such as It or, more particularly, his novella The Body.

There's a sense of affection for those early teenage years when you start to move towards adulthood and the realisation that, in spite of all the heroes you read about, the kind of justice that exists in the real world is agonisingly complex.

The final twist isn't a huge surprise if you know your noir, but the journey towards it is readable and propulsive, and there are moments when Millar captures in a very real sense that hazy, confused time when you begin to realise you can no longer be a child, but have no idea to how to act like an adult.

I won't say what age I was when the Duffy books by Dan Kavanagh (a pen name for Julian Barnes, pictured below) first came out, but I'm sure I wasn't thinking about the very adult world they depicted. Luckily, Orion have recently released the second in the series, giving those of us who missed the fun first time around a chance to catch up. In Fiddle City, the second novel to feature the bisexual private investigator, Duffy finds himself working to catch a group of smugglers in Heathrow airport, known colloquially as "Fiddle City".

The book was originally published in 1981 and, as such, has a few dated references. But the sarcastic tone, the sense of griminess and the, for the time, daring choice of Duffy's sexuality all mean that there's plenty here for modern readers to get their teeth into.

As Kavanagh, Barnes seems to have taken a licence to cut loose, and there's a palpable darkness present at some points in the novel, not least the physically painful scenes of interrogation towards the climax and the descriptions of the scuzzy "Gentleman's" club, Dudes. Most importantly, Duffy himself, in his terse and occasionally OCD manner, is a fine invention. Fiddle City is a witty, swift, smart slice of London hardboiled pastiche.