Crime writing competition: latest crime novels The novelist Neil Gaiman spoke wisely when he declared in a lecture last month that if you want to know about a country, you should read its crime fiction. Nicci French's Waiting for Wednesday (Michael Joseph, £12.99) certainly seems to explore the way we live more nimbly than some of the clodhopping self-proclaimed "state of the nation" novels I've read recently. French made her name (or their name, as the pseudonym conceals a husband-and-wife team) writing intimate psychological thrillers, but with their series about the mysterious psychotherapist and police consultant Frieda Klein they have widened their focus to record as many of the authentic voices of modern Britain as possible: the incorrigible burglar, the transport operator whose response, after a teenager is murdered when her bus doesn't turn up, is "we are fully committed to maintaining an effective service for our customers." But they also let us hear the alternative voice of Britain, that of the majority who try to do their best even though their best may achieve very little. It also seems to me another mark of French's skill that, as more is revealed about Frieda's life, she seems to become more rather than less enigmatic. One can't imagine Frieda Klein getting on with DC Fiona Griffiths, returning for a second outing in Harry Bingham's Love Story, with Murders (Orion, £12.99), and not only because, in her forthright way, Fiona regards psychology, with its "half-baked jargon and faux-scientific references," as "the tarot of modern criminal investigation." Fiona is of a different order of creation from Frieda - as a pot-smoking ex-Cambridge philosophy student recovering from a mental illness, she bears little more relation to a real police officer than Inspector Gadget. But in Bingham's hands she comes exuberantly to life and his tale of the investigation into the death of an exotic dancer whose body parts are found strewn round a Cardiff suburb is richly enjoyable. Perhaps it is the release from the surly bonds of strict realism that gives the novel its buoyancy, although its probings into the British government's sponsoring of arms dealing furnish some surprising revelations. Carnaby (Simon and Schuster, £7.99) is the first novel for young adults by Cate Sampson, previously known as the crime novelist and journalist Catherine Sampson. It begins when the eponymous 13-year-old heroine returns to her grotty flat on a neglected housing estate after school and finds her mother stabbed to death. We aren't required to expend too much sympathy on the dead mother, however, as she turns out to have been the sort of work-shy exploiter of the welfare system that keeps Iain Duncan Smith awake at night. But the authority figures Carnaby encounters after her mother's death - some well-meaning, others less so - seem equally incapable of acting in her best interests. Still, Sampson is far too subtle a novelist to palm us off with a simplistic tale of plucky girl vs the System, and readers will find their sympathies constantly shifting. This is the sort of subject matter that we desperately need our novelists to tackle, although for those who care more about whether a novel is good rather than whether it is necessary, I should add that it is ingenious, gripping and funny. To move onto lighter reading, The Orpheus Descent by Tom Harper (Hodder & Stoughton, £16.99) combines an account of a rock musician's search for his archaeologist girlfriend, Awol after uncovering a parchment containing the key to one of the greatest mysteries of the ancient world, with a storyline set in 389 BC in which an engagingly characterised Plato travels across Europe in search of a missing friend. This is a sort of Platonic ideal of the kind of book Dan Brown attempts to write - a pacy, preposterous, Indiana Jones-esque thriller, but with prose that sparkles, jokes that amuse and characters that resemble human beings. Anne Zouroudi's series in which the epicurean Greek detective Hermes Diaktoros - a man who makes Nero Wolfe look like slimmer of the year - investigates crimes inspired by the Seven Deadly Sins finally reaches Gluttony with The Feast of Artemis (Bloomsbury, £11.99). Firmly in the delicious subgenre of crime-cum-gastroporn pioneered by Andrea Camilleri, the novel has a stab at portraying the dark realities of life in Greece that tourists don't see, but is essentially gloriously sunny escapism, the perfect holiday read. Could you do better than these authors? Enter the Telegraph Harvill Secker crime competition and win £5,000: telegraph.co.uk/crimecomp