Pinnacle of a page-turner is one of this month’s best new books | Books | Entertainment

Blood, Rust and Steel by Stuart MacBride, Hardback, £22

Having become an increasingly large and noisy presence in MacBride’s brilliant Logan McRae series, DI Roberta Steel thoroughly-deserved spin-offs (of which this is the second after And The Corpse Wore Tartan) are a highly enjoyable addition to his Aberdeen-based crime universe. The gloriously un-PC, chain smoking, junk food-eating, booze-hound detective could hardly be less of an advert for Police Scotland, but she gets results – sort of!

Now just weeks away from retirement after 30 years of mayhem, a body found in a wheelie bin sparks all sorts of fresh chaos. Either, Steel’s career will either go out in a bang or explode ignominiously – taking everyone around her with it. Politics, corruption and far-right populism collide in this mercilessly funny, violent and thoroughly entertaining, if occasionally gut-churning, new novel from one of our crime writing masters. 9/10

The Pinnacle by Abir Mukherjee, Hardback, £16.99

Hollywood heart-throb George Abercrombie should be enjoying his life of luxury in a penthouse apartment on the 68th floor of the Pinnacle, Mumbai’s grandest skyscraper, with his much younger wife, Sweety Sahota, the new queen of Bollywood. But he hates the heat and the noise, and the magnum opus he has spent the past decade developing is no closer to being made. After a heavy drinking session following a row with Sweety, George wakes to find her murdered in their bedroom and instantly knows he will be the prime suspect.

As he tries to piece together the night others in the building are covering their tracks and a servant goes on the run. The Pinnacle is a new standalone thriller from the award-winning author of Hunted, and the Wyndham and Banerjee Raj era novels, and is a hugely enjoyable exploration of a lavishly opulent world where everyone is hiding something and scheming to take advantage of others. Mukherjee gets better and better all the time. 8/10.

Failure is Always an Option by Steve Mason, Hardback, £25

Stealing a motorboat from a Cornish recording studio and trying to cross the Channel, signing a £300,000 record deal before they’d played a gig, and telling fans not to buy their debut album because it was “rubbish”… all in a day’s work for The Beta Band. In the late nineties, the Scots mavericks were the hottest group in Britain, blending folk, trip-hop and art-school irony. They burned brightly for eight years before imploding a million quid in debt.

Now frontman Steve Mason has revealed where it all went wrong in this brilliantly entertaining and honest memoir – drugs, depression and record company lassitude along with self-sabotage on a heroic scale. Having sold out last year’s comeback tour in two hours, they’re finally enjoying the acclaim they deserve and Mason’s tamed his demons. We’re lucky to have them back 8/10

Blitz: When World War Two Came Home by John Nichol, Hardback, £25

Starting his journey in North Shields where he grew up, RAF veteran turned historian John Nichol takes a deep dive into the Blitz. Night after night for nearly six years, ordinary Britons were on the front line and under attack – with some 60,000 killed between 1939 and 1945 and millions more injured or left homeless. Eyewitnesses in this compelling and profoundly moving account include Millie Matthews, 99, a contemporary of Nichol’s mother, Catherine, who was just 12 when war broke out yet never spoke to her son about her experiences as the bombs rained down.

The former Tornado navigator has a marvellous eye for detail and a knack of alighting on the most memorable tales. From the ‘heroes with grimy faces’, as Churchill dubbed the firefighters, to the bomb disposal teams and others, this is history at its finest. Truly memorable. 9/10