Adrian McKinty

Orion, £12.99, pp368

Adrian McKinty’s explosively brilliant The Chain opens as a 13-year-old girl, Kylie, is kidnapped from a bus stop as she checks the likes on her Instagram feed. A policeman is shot dead by the kidnappers a couple of pages later, but it’s quickly clear this is not your typical kidnapping crime. Then Kylie’s mum, Rachel, gets a call, and it all starts to become horribly, terrifyingly clear: Kylie’s kidnapping is just the latest in a chain that stretches back years. If Rachel kidnaps another child and pays a ransom, and her victim’s parents then abduct another child, Kylie will be released. If she doesn’t, Kylie will be killed. “It’s that simple,” she’s told. “That’s how The Chain works and goes on for ever.” This is genuinely unputdownable, as Rachel follows “the thread into the heart of the labyrinth”. McKinty’s brilliance lies in exploring just how far a parent will go to rescue their child. These are people committing dreadful crimes – crimes they are horrified by – but they carry them out nonetheless. Terribly plausible.

Laura Lippman

Faber, £12.99, pp352

“Maddie Schwartz, pushing 40, has nothing to look forward to,” observes one of the characters in Laura Lippman’s Lady in the Lake. Maddie thinks otherwise, leaving her husband and son to work on the local Baltimore newspaper. She is desperate for a byline – “ambition comes off this one like heat”, says one man – but this is 1966. She lacks experience and isn’t taken seriously. Maddie is “the kind of woman who laughs at men’s jokes even when they’re not funny”. But when she finds out that the body of a black woman, Cleo Sherwood, has been discovered in a fountain, and that no one else seems to care, she starts to investigate, using every tool at her disposal to pick away at the dangerous secrets and closed ranks that surround this story. Lippman is such a skilful writer, her narrative flitting between perspectives to bring 1960s Baltimore, a world of racial tensions and sexual inequality, to vivid life.

Alex Marwood

Sphere, £12.99, pp400

The body count is ridiculously high within the first few pages of Alex Marwood’s The Poison Garden, as police officers discover a mass suicide at a survivalist, doomsday cult in the Welsh mountains. Only a few members of the cult have survived, among them 22-year-old Romy, who is pregnant and trying to navigate the confusing realities of our world, and her two younger siblings, “orphans of a storm created by other people’s wicked choices”. Moving between timelines, Marwood slowly elucidates the world Romy grew up in, where the children are taught about the dangers of “yew trees and foxgloves and deadly nightshade… adders and hemlock and unwashed wounds” as soon as they can talk, where strange mating rituals and death from tetanus are commonplace. In the present day, Romy learns more about who her mother was and what she ran away from to join the cult, and gradually the reasons for all this death become clearer.

Jo Nesbo

Harvell Secker, £20, pp544

Jo Nesbo says that he’s “been brutal to Harry before but never this brutal”. He’s not kidding: in the latest Harry Hole novel, the 12th in the series, the Norwegian detective is wallowing in epic amounts of Scandi noir. Back on the booze and facing the worst loss of his life, Harry is in a very dark place. As he sets out to solve a killing – and to face off against an old enemy, Svein Finne, who is out of prison and wreaking havoc – he knocks back industrial amounts of alcohol to numb the pain, has dazzling moments of intuition and charms most of the women whose paths he crosses, despite reeking of stale booze. The twists play out brilliantly; the translation by Neil Smith is flawless. This is the king of Norwegian crime on top form. Fans might only ask he give his protagonist a little less of a brutal ride next time round.

• To buy The Chain, Lady in the Lake, The Poison Garden or Knife, go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99