Hallelujah Junction: Composing An American Life by John Adams (Faber, £12.99)

The composer of Nixon In China and The Death Of Klinghoffer, John Adams stands outside contemporary music trends; but, as he shows here, dabbling in them aided him in his quest to “forge a language, Whitman-like, from the compost of American life”. This memoir follows him from a precarious New England childhood with a travelling salesman father, when as a clarinet prodigy he built up his first fan-base at a psychiatric hospital, and through Harvard on his way to a glittering international career. He gives an illuminating account of what it was like to live through an era of serialism, minimalism, Cage-influenced aleatory music, rock and jazz, and of his life-changing epiphany that the great American songwriters shared the “harmonic essence” of the late Romantics. Adams writes with elegant clarity about his development as an artist, and includes frank but diplomatic assessments of his fellow American composers, expressing reservations about Glass but approval of more marginal talents such as Branca.

The Sleepless Ones by James Marrison (Penguin, £7.99)

This is the second book to star DCI Guillermo Downes, a half-Argentinian police detective based, of all places, in the Cotswolds. He’s a copper with a past, which has led to him being exiled from the London force and remaining a bit of an outsider in his own department. His second adventure in print is, given the rural setting, quite grimy and unsettling, kicking off with a sadistic double-murder which brings to light crimes against teenage boys stretching back 20 years or more. Aiming to prevent any meddling coppers or journalists getting too close are two brutally effective goons. And it takes place on a flood plain, a fact you just know is going to come into play later on. Unglamorous, bristling with violence and bad-tempered colleagues, it’s a compelling story that almost makes one identify with the amazement of Sergeant Graves’s snobbish girlfriend that he would rather spend his life in the force than become a merchant banker. Almost.

Tokyo Nights by Jim Douglas (Fledgling, £9.99)

Private detective Colin McCann has been hired by a grieving businessman to investigate his daughter’s fatal overdose, and the trail has led to Tokyo. He’s pursuing Charlie Davis, a charismatic, unpredictable villain who has taken refuge in one of the city’s language schools. Before he arrives, McCann is advised: “In Japan, what appears to be, is. The appearance is the reality.” In other words, however weird things get, these people are doing it for real. It’s good advice for a dazed McCann, who is plunged into a kaleidoscopic nocturnal world where the instincts he has honed as a private eye are little use. Co-written by two men who met in a Japanese language school (Douglas Forrester sadly died before publication), this intoxicating, noir-influenced novel powerfully conveys the sense of being in over one’s head, as a jet-lagged and hungover McCann engages in a battle of wits with his slippery quarry – made worse when they attract the attention of a yakuza-linked entertainment company.