Seldom has a literary creation bounced off the page with as much raw vitality as Freedom Oliver, the central character in Jax Miller’s first novel, Freedom’s Child (HarperCollins, £12.99). Freedom isn’t her real name: she’s in the witness protection programme, working in a biker bar in a small town in Oregon, drinking until she blacks out. Once, she was Nessa Delany from Long Island, accused of killing her abusive husband, NYPD officer Mark, and forced to give her son and daughter up for adoption to keep them out of the clutches of his truly appalling family. It was Mark’s brother Matthew who was convicted of his murder and, 18 years later and newly released from prison, he wants revenge. Brash and savagely witty, with poor impulse control and a heart aching with guilt, Freedom heads for Kentucky on a stolen motorbike, determined to reconnect with her children, who have been adopted by the leader of a Christian doomsday cult, before Matthew and his remaining siblings do. Despite some overly hectic plotting towards the end, this is one of the standout debuts of the year.

Equally memorable, although for very different reasons, is Raymond Verleaux, protagonist of The Beginning of the End by Ian Parkinson (Salt, £8.99). Affectless, depressive and – unsurprisingly – lonely, Raymond’s life is a dreary trudge between his workplace, where he’s constantly passed over for promotion, and his flat, where he consumes meals-for-one and masturbates over online sex chat. He travels to Thailand to acquire a bride in the form of sex worker Joy and brings her home to Belgium, with disastrous consequences, later moving into his dead father’s coastal villa which, being eroded by the sea and swarming with insects and rats, is not perhaps the subtlest of metaphors for the parallel deterioration of Verlaux’s mental and physical state. Written in a spare, dissociated style and including a fair amount of wearily squalid hard-core explicitness, The Beginning of the End won’t be to everyone’s taste, but those who enjoy a good, bleak tale of anomie and alienation can’t go wrong – I found it utterly captivating.

Those who prefer a protagonist with moral authority would do well to try Karin Fossum’s Inspector Sejer series. The Drowned Boy, translated from Norwegian by Kari Dickson (Harvill Secker, £12.99), is the 11th book to feature the old-fashioned, mild-mannered policeman. Here, he is called to the scene of a drowning – Tommy, a 16-month-old boy with Down’s syndrome, has been found dead in a pond – which his colleague feels may not be the accident that Carmen, the boy’s mother, claims it is. Sejer also thinks something “doesn’t feel right” about the pretty, over-entitled 19-year-old, and is torn between his instinct and the knowledge that grief and shock can affect people in different ways. Meanwhile, faultlines in both Carmen’s marriage to Tommy’s father and her relationship with her own doting dad begin to appear ... a simple but gripping story, balanced, believable and compassionate, about a sensitive subject.

A Book of Scars (Quercus, £19.99) by William Shaw is the third novel to feature DS Cathal Breen and the now ex-WPC Helen Tozer. It’s 1969, and Breen and Tozer are trying to solve the murder, five years earlier, of Tozer’s 16-year-old sister Alexandra on the family’s Devon farm. They discover that horrific details of the killing have been kept from the family, and shortly thereafter the original investigating officer is brutally dispatched in the same manner as poor Alexandra. Suspicion falls on Tozer, but it soon becomes clear to Breen that the case has its roots in the Mau-Mau uprising in Kenya over a decade earlier. A Book of Scars is both a first-rate mystery and a compelling and accurate portrait of a changing society that is confused about the present and ill-at-ease with the past.

The past also impacts on the present – although with a closer focus – in In Bitter Chill, the first novel by Sarah Ward (Faber, £12.99). Genealogist Rachel Jones is the survivor of two schoolgirls who were kidnapped in 1978, but she has very little memory of the event and can throw no light on why her friend, Sophie Jenkins, disappeared, or who might have been responsible. When, 37 years later, Sophie’s mother is found dead in a local hotel, the police are unsure whether the apparent suicide is linked to the earlier tragedy, and Rachel, who has struggled to put the past behind her, is forced to re-examine what happened. Set in a claustrophobic small town in Derbyshire, this promising if somewhat uneven debut is a genuinely intriguing Chinese puzzle box of a mystery about family secrets.

• Laura Wilson’s latest novel is The Wrong Girl (Quercus).