A PERFECT book for the sun lounger: 22 of the world’s finest crime and thriller novelists have come together to write 11 new short stories using their best known characters — a sequel to the chart-topping collection Face Off three years ago. This time, each author combination is a male and female one, and the results are a delicious confection of hard-boiled, fast-moving stories with an emotional heart. Val McDermid’s Tony Hill combines with Peter James’s Roy Grace in an elegant, if gruesome, tale about the lengths foot fetishists may go to in order to fulfil their fantasies, while Lee Child’s Jack Reacher teams up with Kathy Reichs’s forensic anthropologist Tempe Brennan to challenge the charge that she killed an investigative reporter. Both are worth the price of admission alone, but so are many of the others.