What’s more, the circumstances of her death are worryingly similar to an unsolved case of Frank’s from way back in the past, so it’s all systems go to try to solve the old and new crimes. Political thrillers aren’t really my thing, but Dead Watch has the unmistakable Sandford touch, and that’s good enough for me.Darkness and Light by John Harvey (WILLIAM HEINEMANN £12.99 £11.50 (P&P FREE) 08700 798 897)Retired coppers in crime fiction never stay retired for long And Frank Elder, John Harvey’s latest hero, is no exception That’s good for Harvey fans, of which I’m one. Jake Winter, ex-army special forces and now a big-time bureaucrat at the White House, is called in to solve the problem with extreme prejudice. Which he does, as the body count rises and the plot thickens. I love his books, and this is one of the very best.
Dead Watch by By John Sandford (SIMON & SCHUSTER £11.99 £10.50 (P&P FREE 08700 798 897)An ex-senator from Virginia goes missing and is presumed dead when a headless body fitting his description is found tied to a tree, while his wife is threatened by The Watchmen, a new political force in the US with sinister motives. As always Lansdale writes with a gentle reverence for the past and the present.

But Stanley learns a lot about life and death that year as he discovers a treasure trove of love letters in an abandoned house and, with the help of a retired Indian reservation policeman and his own sister Caldonia, he solves the mystery of the murders of two young women a generation previously, and faces a nemesis who would be happy to see him dead too. And in Dewmont, Texas, The Monotones and Elvis are on the jukebox when 13-year-old Stanley Mitchel Jr, and his family arrive to open up the Dew Drop Drive-in on a long hot day that summer. A Fine Dark Line by Joe R Lansdale (WEIDENFELD £16.99 £15.50 (P&P FREE) 08700 798 897)

It’s 1958 and rock’n'roll is here to stay. Manhunt is an enjoyable, and often exciting, portrayal of what must have been twelve of the most turbulent days in American history.. But for the most part the narrative – which relies on numerous first-hand and contemporary accounts, as well as Swanson’s own retracing of Booth’s steps – has a convincing feel, full of detail and dialogue. Swanson notes with a shudder that some of Booth’s vertebrae “repose today in a little-known medical museum, one attraction among thousands in a hideous collection devoted to documenting the wounds of the American Civil War”.Swanson, a lawyer and historian from Washington, DC, is rather too fond of applying theatrical metaphors to his subject – “Booth broke the fourth wall between artist and audience by creating a new, dark art – performance assassination,” he notes at one point, and he occasionally indulges in speculation of the “Did Booth reminisce about happier days?” type. neatly framed” or “a piece of linen with a portion of his brain”.

In the years after the killing, many of those connected to the case became “post-assassination entrepreneurs”, giving lectures, hawking memorabilia, or collecting strange and often morbid mementos such as “a lock of [Lincoln's] hair… Swanson frequently compares those who betray or abandon Booth to Judas, and lauds the “honour” of the loyal Confederate sympathisers, such as Thomas Jones and Elizabeth Quesenberry, who assist him on his journey south.The book delights in strange characters such as Jones, an ingenious “river ghost” who helps Booth cross the Potomac, and Boston Corbett, an eccentric English immigrant and devoted reader of Matthew 18 (“if thy hand or thy foot offend thee, cut them off”), who castrated himself after being “tempted by fallen women” and played a key role in the final, mishandled attempt to capture Booth. Seward was seriously injured by Lewis Powell, one of Booth’s conspirators, that night, although a more reluctant associate, George Atzerodt, bottled out of attacking Johnson.Although he condemns Booth’s racism, Swanson displays some sympathy for the assassin and his audacious cross-country escape, which took place despite an intensely painful injury to his leg, fractured when he jumped from the presidential box, and huge government efforts to track him down. Lincoln’s murder on April 14, 1865, was part of a wider plot which also involved killing Andrew Johnson, the vice president, and William Seward, the secretary of state. The year before the Lincoln killing, he had secretly masterminded an aborted plan to kidnap the president and hold him hostage in the South, thus turning the tide of the war. Booth – supposedly a distant relative of Cherie Blair – was ardently pro-slavery, and a firm supporter of states’ rights and the South’s attempt to secede.

Already known as “the handsomest, best-dressed man in Washington”, the 26-year-old firmly caught the public imagination during his getaway and was immortalised in widely distributed photographs, paintings and songs throughout the country. Swanson gives us some evidence of this more divisive Lincoln in the Sunday sermons that admonished the president for being in a theatre when he died, and on Good Friday, too.Booth’s image was also transformed in the wake of the killing. Swanson’s portrayal of Lincoln colludes in this sanctification, emphasising the essential goodness, modesty and even the intimidating physical strength of the president.But he does acknowledge that, before his death, Lincoln was “a controversial and unpopular war leader”; it was Booth’s act, meant to undermine Lincoln’s policies, which ended up strengthening the Republican administration and establishing the president as an American folk hero. “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that,” he wrote in 1862. Booth managed 12 days on the run as the most wanted man in America, aided by an oddball collection of Confederate sympathisers, before coming face-to-face with Union soldiers in a tobacco barn about 40 miles from Richmond, the fallen capital of his beaten Confederacy.
The popular image of Lincoln today is that of the secular saint who went to war against slavery, although at the time the president made it clear that his primary motivation was to prevent the break-up of the country.