Mayhem

Sarah Pinborough based her latest novel, Mayhem (Jo Fletcher Books, £14.99), on a series of Victorian crimes known as the Thames torso murders and weaves real-life characters into a compulsively readable story that starts as a conventional murder mystery and morphs, by degrees, into a horrifying supernatural thriller. Police surgeon Dr Thomas Bond, insomniac and opium addict, is determined to find the killer of a series of women fished, headless and limbless, from the river. Haunted by a tragic past, he becomes obsessed with a shadowy figure who frequents the opium dens of the London docklands – and while in lesser hands Bond might have become a stereotype, Pinborough skilfully builds a rounded portrait of a flawed but likable character. She's also excellent at portraying a rank London dripping with vice, and doesn't hold back when describing the gruesome violence perpetrated by her antagonist.

Red moon

Red Moon by Benjamin Percy (Hodder & Stoughton, £12.99) opens with the bloody slaughter of passengers aboard a flight from San Francisco to Portland, but these terrorists – while motivated by political ideals – are not your run-of-the-mill fundamentalists but werewolves. In Percy's alternative US, "lycans" live in the community thanks to the drug lupex, which inhibits their transformation. We follow three protagonists – a survivor of the opening slaughter, an anti-lycan politician and a teenage werewolf girl – on an examination of identity and xenophobia in a world fearful of the other in its midst. Red Moon is that rare beast, a genre novel that is literary, politically aware and thought-provoking.

Angelfall

Another book that juxtaposes myth and reality, though without Red Moon's political insight, is Susan Ee's first novel, Angelfall (Hodder, £6.99), a self-published runaway bestseller with a movie adaptation in the making. "Angels of the Apocalypse" have laid waste to Earth and our tough, streetwise heroine, 17-year-old Penryn, inhabits a suburban no man's land terrorised by street gangs and homicidal angels. On her young shoulders weighs the responsibility of caring for her insane mother and physically disabled younger sister, and when her sister is kidnapped by angels Penryn ventures into the angels' redoubt in San Francisco to try to get her back. Slick, fast, and hip, Angelfall is the first in a projected five-book series that will appeal to fans of The Hunger Games and Twilight.

Seoul survivors

Naomi Foyle's debut novel, Seoul Survivors (Jo Fletcher Books, £16.99), takes a cast of quirky characters, sets them down in a convincingly portrayed near-future South Korea, then threatens them with Lucifer's Hammer, a meteor that is scheduled to hit the planet. Beautiful Sydney Travers has come to Seoul to find her fortune as a fashion model, and finds herself involved with Canadian drug runner Damien Meadows and the silkily deceptive Dr Kim Da Mi, an ambiguously drawn possible saviour of humankind – or a demented megalomaniac. Foyle's strengths are her impeccable plotting, her rendering of a futuristic Seoul and the depiction of Sydney Travers' gradualinveiglement in the nightmare of Dr Kim's cloning experiment.

Carpathia

Another impending disaster awaits in Matt Forbeck's Carpathia (Angry Robot, £7.99). Forbeck takes the descendants from Bram Stoker's Dracula and sends them on a journey aboard the ill-fated Titanic, to heart-stopping effect. It's non-stop action from the off, with some vividly rendered set-piece scenes as the Titanic goes down and our heroes battle to survive. By the time they're picked up by the first ship on the scene, the Carpathia, they've experienced sufficient excitement for a couple of lifetimes. But the real challenge is just about to begin: the ship is home to a vampire named Dushko and his squabbling coven of unruly bloodsuckers – and they're thirsty. Carpathia is fast, furious, and great fun.

• Eric Brown's latest novel, The Serene Invasion is published by Solaris