

Photograph: PR

American Stephanie Wrobel’s first novel, The Recovery of Rose Gold (Michael Joseph, £14.99), begins after the point where most Munchausen’s syndrome narratives end: with confirmation that the victim is not, in fact, ill, but has been systematically made so by a supposed carer. Patty Watts, who convinced everybody that her daughter Rose Gold was desperately sick by poisoning and starving the girl for the best part of two decades, has now completed her prison sentence. Rose Gold has agreed that her mother can live in the house she shares with her infant son, and Patty hopes for reconciliation. With mother and daughter taking turns to narrate, it soon becomes clear that where manipulation is concerned, the apple hasn’t fallen far from the tree. Pacey and vivid, this is a delicate, merciless probing of a topic as unsettling as it is intriguing, with no pat answers.

Another complicated and disturbing subject, domestic violence, is the theme of Keeper by Jessica Moor (Viking, £14.99). When Katie Straw’s body is discovered in a river, the police label it a suicide. The director of the women’s shelter where Katie works thinks otherwise, but DS Daniel Whitworth and his team remain unconvinced until they discover that “Katie Straw” is a pseudonym and the identity of their corpse is unknown. A parallel narrative recounts Katie’s deteriorating relationship with her boyfriend. Initially courteous and attentive, Jamie becomes more oppressive and Katie becomes more confused – as the doughty shelter director explains, “control can feel like love”. We learn how the various women taking refuge at the shelter came to be there; their backgrounds may be different, but they all have good reason to fear for their lives. And now a man has been seen hanging around outside … Powerful and chilling, with a shocking twist, Keeper is an important story, well told.

The abandonment by society of traumatised former service personnel is also an important subject. Homeless veteran Jimmy, protagonist of Trevor Wood’s The Man on the Street (Quercus, £14.99), was invalided out of the navy after the Falklands war and left to fight his own battle with PTSD. Self-medication with alcohol resulted in a broken marriage and an estranged daughter and, having done time in prison and sofa-surfed away his remaining social capital, he has ended up sleeping on the streets of Newcastle. Waking from one of his frequent nightmares, he believes he may have witnessed a crime but, distrustful of authority and having learned the hard way to stay out of other people’s fights, he fails to report it. However, when an appeal made by the victim’s daughter jogs his conscience, the two join forces to discover what happened. Solid plotting, strong characterisation and a likable and sympathetic protagonist add up to an assured debut.

The fictitious Caribbean island of Camaho is the setting for British-Grenadian author Jacob Ross’s projected quartet of novels, the first of which, The Bone Readers, won the inaugural Jhalak prize for BAME writers in 2017. Black Rain Falling (Sphere, £14.99) continues the story of DC Michael “Digger” Digson. When his CID colleague Miss Stanislaus kills a man, their superiors believe it to be murder and give him six weeks to prove that she was acting in self-defence. The victim, Juba Hurst, who raped Miss Stanislaus when she was 14 and fathered the child she struggles to love, had been terrorising a neighbouring island, but his power was such that the police were afraid to take action. In order to investigate, Digger must negotiate a minefield of familial connections, long-standing vendettas and large-scale corruption in this atmospheric and compelling drama.

Winner of the 2018 Grand Prix de Littérature Policière, Marion Brunet’s Summer of Reckoning (translated by Katherine Gregor, Bitter Lemon, £8.99) is set in a Provence that’s a world away from the chattering classes’ holiday paradise, where poverty, boredom and casual racism are the prevailing forces. Sixteen-year-old Céline is pregnant and, despite violence from her alcoholic father Manuel, refuses to divulge the name of the man responsible. Mother Severine is dismayed at the prospect of grandmotherhood at 34; Céline’s teachers and classmates are judgmental, and her only ally is her 15-year-old sister Jo, who dreams of escape. In need of a scapegoat, Manuel, who “longs to fight – constantly and with everybody”, lights on the girls’ friend Saïd, son of Moroccan immigrants. There’s an appalling, slow-motion car crash inevitability to this concise and beautifully written novel, not only about the disastrous consequences of Manuel’s idée fixe, but also about the identity of the real father and the guilt and shame that follow.

If minimalism doesn’t do it for you, try The Clutter Corpse by Simon Brett (Severn House, £20.99), the first in a series featuring professional tidier-upper Ellen Curtis. Determined to discover the truth about the dead body she has found under a heap of junk in a hoarder’s flat, this psychologist in rubber gloves is the engaging narrator of a mostly light-hearted mystery.