The Necropolis Railway by Andrew Martin (Faber, £10.99) is set in 1903, and follows the fortunes of Jim Stringer, a Yorkshire lad who dreams of working on t' trains. This, he believes, will be a profession far more distinguished than that of his father, a butcher. An ardent reader of the Railway Magazine, Stringer has romanticised the idea of being a train driver. He imagines noble men hurtling along at speed, the wind in their hair and coal dust on their cheeks. When the mysterious Rowland Smith offers him a chance to work at Waterloo in London, he jumps at the chance, even though he is a hundred years early for the snazzy blue-and-yellow peaked hat, with matching waistcoat, of today.

Stringer soon discovers that life in London is hard, dirty and difficult, especially when he is assigned to work on the Necropolis Railway, which ferries funeral parties to and from the nearby Brookwood crematorium. An outcast from the start, suspected of being a company spy, things get worse when he finds out that his predecessors (also enthusiastic lads from the provinces) have met grim ends.

Martin weaves the dark menace of London expertly into this tale: the narrow streets and constant noise provide a perfect backdrop for murderous and sinister happenings. Most impressive is his ability to capture the grinding difficulty of a working life at the turn of the 20th century: back-breaking toil, long hours and scant rewards that should put the modern, moaning man to shame.

The novel turns on whether Stringer can unlock the murderous secret of the Necropolis Railway before he becomes just another missing person. There are moments, particularly in the fearful, smog-filled engine sheds, when serving scrag ends in a butcher's shop doesn't seem such a bad career choice after all.

In Meet the Wife (Picador, £12), Clive Sinclair reworks the story of Odysseus's journey to Hades, setting it in a fictional land where a paternalistic dictator has just met his maker. Pumpkin, one of the bean or seed types after which the main characters are named, is our delightful journalist-narrator. Problems with his bladder notwithstanding, he seems jovially unconcerned by the dramatic events unfolding around him, even when turned into a pig by Circe, or confronting the dead in Hades. There are echoes here of Salman Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories: the books share a marvellous sense of the surreal. The secret police in Sinclair's Sardinia arrest their citizens "for looking miserable", a problem the inhabitants seek to avoid by chewing crow feet to induce rictus in the jaw, thus giving the appearance of a permanent smile.

Hades is also the theme of "The Naked and the Dead", the second novella of the volume, in which we follow a jealous photographer as he seeks to discover the identity of a figure in a photograph who bears a startling resemblance to his unfaithful wife, whose infidelity is linked directly to her death from breast cancer. There are startling images, such as when the dying wife is transformed into a tree, the only clue to her previous existence a wedding ring entwined in the branches.

The journey to discover the doppelganger brings the photographer into contact with Wyatt Earp, the Lone Ranger and even the gatekeeper of Hades. There is hilarity and pathos, especially when the narrator is reunited with his recently deceased wife.

Zanzibar (Faber, £14.99) is a great name to say out loud. It conjures images of exotic Africa (and seems to frighten away late summer wasps). Giles Foden writes persuasively about Africa. Here, as in The Last King of Scotland, his Whitbread-winning novel about the final days of the corrupt rule of Idi Amin, he modishly mixes fact with fiction, in an account of the events that led up to, and immediately followed, the bombing of the US embassies in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi by al-Qaeda.

The publication of this novel has no doubt been delayed by the events of 11 September; no one could accuse Foden of not having an eye for a good story, and he must have written up against a very tight deadline indeed. Osama Bin Laden plays a major role here - as he soon will in many other political thrillers - pulling the strings of his al-Qaeda puppets as they plot an atrocity so damaging that, he predicts, "when this thing is done the Americans will put a price on my head, offering millions for my capture". Whatever could he mean? The plot follows, amid the ensuing mayhem, the intertwining fortunes of a handsome marine biologist ineffectually protecting the coral reefs of Zanzibar (Nick Karolides), an al-Qaeda recruit beginning to question the absolute righteousness of his deeds (Khaled al-Khidr), a pretty new embassy worker hoping to climb the ranks (Miranda Powers) and a hard-bitten, one-armed anti-terrorist expert (Jack Queller).

Foden bravely examines the US retaliatory strikes on "known" terrorist targets with the same cynicism as he does the motives of his fictional Bin Laden. It all makes for a fascinating read: Wilbur Smith meets William Boyd in the warm seas and spice-scented air of Zanzibar. But the story is flawed, partly by a stilted and unconvincing love affair between Karolides (the hero) and Powers (who sounds more like a "groovy baby" porn star), and partly because sections of the book have all the flatness of an ill-disguised movie script.

Matthew Jennings is a television scriptwriter

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