Ruth Ware

Harvill Secker, £12.99, pp352

Rowan, the narrator of Ruth Ware’s spooky, tense thriller about an apparent haunting in the Highlands, starts her story with a bundle of letters to a barrister. Written from prison, they plead with him to take her on as a client. “I guess it comes down to this in the end. I am the nanny in the Elincourt case, Mr Wrexham. And I didn’t kill that child.” The Turn of the Key then shifts back in time and Rowan tells her story from her discovery of an advert looking for a “practical, unflappable” nanny to look after four children in the wilds of Scotland. She learns that the four previous incumbents have resigned in the past 14 months, but takes the job anyway, despite the discovery of an ominous note left by her predecessor and the desperate pleading of one of her new charges to stay away because “the ghosts wouldn’t like it”. Left on her own with the children almost from the start, things quickly go from bad to worse – creaking footsteps at night, lost keys, a walled garden filled with poisonous plants, a history of hauntings. Ware tells a cracking tale and, as in her breakout novel In a Dark, Dark Wood, the house itself plays a hugely menacing part in proceedings.

Louise Doughty

Faber & Faber, £12.99, pp448

The ghost in Louise Doughty’s Platform Seven offers a different kind of haunting. For much of the book, she is unable to remember her own story, tethered to Peterborough station and its surroundings, as she wonders how she came to die on platform seven two years earlier, and what led a man to the same place. Malign presences stalk this tale and the Apple Tree Yard author goes on to unravel a scarily plausible story of emotional abuse and coercive control, one that led to Lisa Evans’s death and which will go on to play out in the lives of many other women, unless young British Transport Police officer PC Akash Lockhart can dig deeper into her apparent suicide. Platform Seven manages to be both rooted in the horror of human evil – “Sometimes, it’s like you’re trying to give me a glimpse of what you’d be like if you were a bad person,” Lisa says to her boyfriend at one point, careful to keep a light laugh in her voice as she tries to steer him on to a better path, and tinged with supernatural terrors: “My cold anger rises and rises inside me until I bloat like an unspeakable thing,” Lisa tells us, as the reality of how she has ended up in this situation becomes clear. It is, finally, desperately moving.

JP Delaney

Quercus, £12.99, pp448

Readers who liked Before I Go to Sleep by SJ Watson will enjoy The Perfect Wife, JP Delaney’s futuristic twist on the story of an amnesiac wife with a secretive husband. Abbie wakes with no memory of how she ended up in a hospital bed. Tim, her husband, is beside her, crying with joy; a Silicon Valley genius, he explains to her that she’s “artificial. Intelligent, conscious… but manmade” – a companion robot, or cobot, created five years after Abbie’s death.

“After I lost you, plenty of people told me I should move on, find someone else to spend my life with. But I knew that was never going to happen. So I did this instead.” As she struggles to come to terms with this new reality, she learns there are rules: Tim won’t tell her how she died, won’t let her go outside and blocks access to searches on the internet. When she finds a hidden tablet, she begins to investigate...

How the Dead Speak

Val McDermid

Little, Brown, £18.99, pp416

Clinical psychologist and profiler Tony Hill and detective Carol Jordan are not in good places, literally or emotionally, as Val McDermid’s How the Dead Speak opens. At the start of the 11th book in the series, Tony is in prison, six months into a four-year sentence for killing a murderer to prevent Carol from having to do it; Carol has resigned from the police force and is trying to deal with her PTSD. Her former team, meanwhile, is struggling without her as they look into the discovery of a large number of bodies in the grounds of a convent, while a serial killer is plotting his next move. This might be well into the Hill/Jordan series, but McDermid’s storytelling is as classy and compelling as ever.

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