Murder stalks all the pathways of these novels, from the North Carolina swamp trails of The Weirdo to the bleak London estates of Riot. There the similarities end; their terrains are very different, and readers’ pleasures will depend upon their own horizons. If they want to stick with an EastEnder of a novel, then they’ll probably go for Riot or Talking to Strangers; if they prefer the excitingly far-fetched (with football boots on), then it’ll be Death Penalty. If their interests stretch to an unfamiliar environment, populated by wild animals and less civilised humans, then they might very much enjoy The Weirdo.

What you see is what you get as far as Riot and Talking to Strangers are concerned. Riot, in the popular Point series, employs short chapters and straightforward language to chart the experiences of 16-year-old Stevie on his London estate. If you were a cynic, you might feel that Peter Beere has calculatedly mixed together race, violence, alcholism and youth unemployment, added a spice of sexual titillation, poured the lot into the empty world of the urban teenager and served it all up for readers to swallow. There’s much more to be explored about the success of the Point series, however. Some readers are not ready to travel beyond the familiar; and one powerful function of story is to hear a version of your own experience played back to you. Whether the world of Riot is any more true to life than Neighbours is another story. The sadness of it all is that the novel offers such a bleak view of things.

Talking to Strangers will probably attract slightly younger readers, though its setting and its theme (the disappearance and murder of a child) are equally sombre; and its “villain” (a harsh term for one abused himself) is rather more menacing than anyone in Riot. For a while, nothing much happens and when the narrator complains of boredom it’s hard not to share her view. In its later stages, however, the novel surges into chilling excitement.

Death Penalty (Point Crime this time) is almost one of those Roy of the Rovers they-don’t-write-‘em-like-that-any-more stories. However, Dennis Hamley is a particularly skilled yarn spinner with a feel for unabashed melodrama. He is also a stunning prophet - the novel begins with a goalkeeper fixing a match! There’s a hanging straight off, then a red-carded defender becomes a bloody corpse in the plunge bath before the rest of the lads get back to the dressing room after the final whistle. As if Radwick Rangers aren’t in enough trouble, the goalkeeper (prime suspect) is garrotted at the foot of his own goalpost, and their striker can deliberately . . . but I shouldn’t give the game away. Not surprisingly, after all the shenanigans, the ending only just holds together, but many a reader will enjoy this roller-coaster of a read.

Teachers may remember Theodore Taylor best for The Cay (1969), a popular class reader in the Seventies when books exploring racial prejudice were hard to find for younger secondary classes. In The Weirdo, Taylor is still concerned with human blindness. Here, the most engaging presences are the novel’s setting, the Powhatan Swamp itself; the black bears which live there; and two young people who come to care profoundly for the animals’ conservation. One of them, Chip, has been ferociously burned in a plane crash, and the book is very much about his own acceptance of himself through his work with the bears; the other, Sam, is moving towards a slow affirmation of her womanhood in a very male environment. The book takes you by the throat with the discovery of a corpse in the opening sentence and soon there is another murder. Who has killed the victim, a research environmentalist, is not critically important, for he has stood in the way of all the red-necked hunters, including Sam’s father, who are desperate to reassert their manhoods as soon as a ban on hunting in the Swamp is lifted.

Taylor’s feeling for the land and his detailed observation of its animals are at once powerful and gentle; and the violence in the novel, since it is not gratuitous, is all the more ugly and credible. Varied narrative modes are employed and the reader must build a picture of events and places through different voices and times. The mystery is compelling - but many readers may remember the eerie fascination of the living swamp long after the details of the crime have faded.