It took a little while, but young British crime writers have finally woken up to the fact that today you don't have to write like PD James to find a publisher.

The past three or four years have thrown up a number of bright young Brits intent on demonstrating that imitation is indeed the sincerest form of flattery, as they strive to emulate the style of super-successful American writers such as James Ellroy and Carl Hiaasen.

Mostly such attempts amount to nothing more than limp pastiche. However Max Kinnings goes closer than most with his first novel Hitman (Flame, £6.99).

Kinnings has written the quintessential caper, which, while it relies heavily on the loadsa-drink-loadsa-drugs-loadsaguns-and-how-crazy-am-I? school of contemporary fiction, has the huge advantage of a plot that is imaginative and entirely impossible. Whatever else Hitman may be, it isn't, thank God, gritty realism.

The idea is that our hero, a pretend private eye, coked-up to his hairline and driving a BMW far too fast round central London, is hired to kill a former convict.

To the sad fact of his ineptitude is added the awkwardness of knowing that his target is a man with extraordinary psychic powers who understands perfectly that our man is after him.

Fresh and funny, Hitman qualifies as top-class entertainment.

Falling firmly into the category of gritty realism is another first novel, Michael Ledwidge's The Narrowback (Little, Brown: £5.99). Ledwidge is a New Yorker who has flung himself headlong into the noir market with a novel about Irish-American cons who pull off the perfect heist, only to come badly unstuck with the involvement of the IRA and the Albanian Mafia.

If your taste in thrillers runs to frank descriptions of the violent, squalid and hopeless lives led by hoodlums in Hell's Kitchen, this the novel for you. Otherwise, watch NYPD Blue for a similar effect with rather better production values.

From the down and dirty streets of New York to the shark infested boulevards of Miami; next up is The Shot by Philip Kerr (Orion: £5.99). Kerr is an established writer of conventional US thrillers who this time has turned his attention to America in 1960, a time when Reds lurked under every bed, the CIA was trying to poison Castro's cigars, and John F Kennedy was running for president.

Kerr's central character is the professional assassin Tom Jefferson, hired by the mob and the CIA for a high-profile hit.

The plot has everything - Mafia, CIA, FBI, Secret Service, teamsters, Kennedys, communists, Cuban exiles, the Rat Pack - and yomps along to a satisfactory conclusion via a genuinely surprising twist. Hokum for sure, but hokum of the highest quality.