FORMER Yorkshire mining engineer Stuart Pawson has struck gold with his crime collection featuring the affable detective Charlie Priest and his crew.

Shooting Elvis (Allison & Bushby, £18.99) is book 11 in the series and, if you've not read Pawson before, shame on you.

Priest and the team are on the trail of a shiny-shoe wearing serial killer, dubbed The Executioner, who is causing terror in the fictional Yorkshire town of Heckley, somewhere between Halifax and Huddersfield.

His first victim is an elderly man, who just happens to look like a murderer known as the Midnight Strangler.

The death is set up to look like a suicide, but Priest, now acting detective chief inspector, thinks otherwise.

When a drug dealer is found dead in his home, Priest thinks the deaths are linked. He and the team come under pressure to discover what motivates the killer.

They suspect it might be Priest himself, and this is confirmed when his girlfriend, a former world-class athlete known as La Gazelle, is kidnapped. Brilliant stuff.

No thriller round-up is complete without the obligatory James Patterson book. His latest, The Fifth Horseman (Headline), £17.99) co-written with Maxine Paetro, features the popular Women's Murder Club.

Detective Lindsay Boxer and newest member of the club, lawyer Yuki Castellano, are out shopping with Yuki's mother, Keiko, when Keiko has a minor stroke. She is rushed to the San Francisco Medical Center and admitted to the ICU.

Then Lindsay and the gang learn of a huge malpractice suit against hospital. In the past few years, dozens of patients who were admitted to the emergency room seemed to recover and then died suspicious deaths. Is Yuki's mother safe in such a place? Patterson's trademark short and snappy chapters propel matters along at breakneck speed. With a great plot, strong characters and effective twists, The Fifth Horseman is Patterson's best for a while.

Frank Barnard's debut novel Blue Man Falling (Headline, £18.99) is a triumph. It's September 1939, the Nazis have invaded Poland and Europe holds its breath.

For RAF fighter pilots patrolling the Franco-German border it's a bizarre time: one moment they are chasing an elusive Luftwaffe, the next ordering champagne in Paris.

Then, in May 1940, Hitler launches Blitzkrieg and the Hurricane squadrons find themselves in battle.

Blue Man Falling follows the fortunes of two RAF pilots - Englishman Kit Curtis and American Ossie Wolf - during the Battle of France 1939-40.

This is boy's own adventure stuff, Biggles on speed - an excellent read.

Val McDermid, who is better known for her Wire In The Blood series starring Robson Green, has written a corking stand-alone thriller, The Grave Tattoo (HarperCollins, £17.99), which cries out for TV treatment.

When torrential rain uncovers the body of a tattooed man on a Lake District hillside, tongues start wagging.

For centuries, locals have believed that Fletcher Christian - of Mutiny of the Bounty fame - staged the massacre on the Pitcairn Islands and returned to Britain.

Here, he told his story to his old school chum William Wordsworth, of Grasmere, who turned it into a long narrative poem, and kept it hidden.

Now, Wordsworth specialist Jane Gresham, herself a native of the Lake District, feels compelled to discover whether the manuscript ever existed.

As she pursues each new lead, death follows hard on her heels. Suddenly Jane is at the heart of a 200-year-old mystery that still has the power to put lives at risk.

The Grave Tattoo is Miss Marple meets The Da Vinci Code, a wonderfully-entertaining novel from the queen of crime writing.

Talking of the Da Vinci Code, Spanish author Javier Sierra has written what he claims is the truth behind one of Da Vinci's best-known works, The Last Supper.

It's 1497 and Fray Augustin Leyre, a Dominican Inquisitor and expert on the interpretation of secret messages, is sent to supervise Leonardo Da Vinci's last touches to The Last Supper painting in Milan. He was sent by Pope Alejandro VI, who had heard that Da Vinci was painting the 12 apostles without their halo of sanctity, that the chalice was missing, and that Leonardo had painted himself in the painting with his back to Jesus. Was Leonardo Da Vinci a heretic?

The Secret Supper (Simon & Schuster,£12.99) is a tale of murder, mystery and monks with a rather-confusing and unsatisfactory conclusion.

For those who like their novels fast and furious, and without taxing the old grey cells too much, Matthew Reilly's Seven Ancient Wonders (McMillan, £12.99) should fit the bill.

It is the biggest treasure hunt in history with contesting nations involved in a headlong race to locate the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

Four thousands years ago, a magnificent golden capstone sat at the peak of the Great Pyramid of Giza. It was a source of immense power, reputedly capable of bestowing upon its holder absolute global power. However, then it was divided into seven pieces and hidden, each piece separately, in the seven greatest structures of the age.

Now it's 2006, and the coming of a rare solar event means it's time to locate the seven pieces and rebuild the capstone.

Everyone wants it, from the most powerful countries on earth to gangs of terrorists.

Comic-book stuff, that's easy on the brain.

Updated: 16:57 Friday, March 17, 2006