I love crime fiction. I was a fan – no, let's be honest, an addict – long before I was a published author. Just as well, since I've chaired the "New Blood" panel at the Theakstons Old Peculier crime writing festival at Harrogate almost every year since it began 10 years ago. And that means a small mountain of extra reading.

Some people might be daunted by the prospect of working their way through 50-plus debut novels, but it's my idea of heaven. Discovering a new voice provides a frisson of excitement – the book itself and the promise for the future it contains. There's also a practical side to this pleasure. I don't want to be stuck in a rut, writing and rewriting the same book, so it's important to me to have a sense of what fresh voices are saying and what their concerns are. Their work opens up possibilities I might not have considered.

And I'm used to noticing emerging trends within the genre. Sometimes outside events trigger a cluster of books with the same premise. A drought-stricken summer, where flooded villages emerged from reservoirs, produced the following year at least four novels about drowned secrets. But often there's no obvious reason why a disparate group of writers choose similar settings or themes.

SJ Watson's 2011 debut novel Before I Go to Sleep has been an international sensation, topping bestseller lists and picking up awards all over the place. It's currently being filmed, with Nicole Kidman and Mark Strong. When Watson appeared at Harrogate, however, all this lay ahead of him. He overcame his shyness to discuss his novel, a gripping psychological thriller with the ultimate unreliable narrator – a woman with memory problems.

Before I Go to Sleep is a page-turning example of one current trend – ordinary people whose domestic lives are turned upside down by a series of unexpected and often terrifying events that place them and their families in jeopardy. The reader is constantly unsettled by the impossibility of working out whose version of events is to be trusted. Other examples of writers operating in this unsettling style are debut author Paula Daly (Just What Kind of Mother Are You?) and another bestseller, Gillian Flynn (Sharp Objects, Gone Girl). I defy anyone to work out all their twists and turns.

Belinda Bauer was a shoo-in for the New Blood panel with her 2010 debut novel, Blacklands. It went on to win the Gold Dagger award, and it exemplifies another trend. Once, the village mystery was at the heart of British crime writing. Back then, the setting was the cosy world of Miss Marple, where bleak reality never intruded. But today's crime writers present a more honest image of rural life.

Writers such as Ann Cleeves (the Vera series and the Shetland Quartet) and Peter May (the Lewis Trilogy) are mining this seam, which has the added advantage of settings that, although they're in our own small country, still feel exotic and unsettling. They're familiar in one sense – the same food and drink, the same basic building blocks of society, the same TV shows – but they're alien in terms of their backdrop and local customs. I bet the local tourist boards love them, especially when they're adapted for TV.

Not everywhere is so obviously a tourist attraction. David Mark's The Dark Winter introduced readers to Hull. His experience as a local newspaper journalist means he understands his patch, so he brings the city to life. It's not enough to have a great sense of place, though. The best regional crime novels are always peopled by characters we care about, and who draw us into their unfamiliar lives.

Regional noir began more than 20 years ago with writers such as Ian Rankin (Edinburgh), John Harvey (Nottingham) and my own Manchester-based Kate Brannigan. But it has lost nothing of its early vigour and reveals us to ourselves in a way that few other styles of writing can manage. Its concern with the bigger picture, its willingness to engage with society, and its descriptions of urban landscapes have as powerful a grip as ever Other writers with distinct non-metropolitan cityscapes include Stuart MacBride (Aberdeen), Ewart Hutton (Mid-Wales), Tom Benn (Manchester) and Denise Mina (Glasgow).

But the London-based cop novel is also going through something of a renaissance. Writers such as Stav Sherez (A Dark Redemption, Eleven Days) and Oliver Harris (Hollow Man, Deep Shelter) are bringing a hard edge to stories of contemporary policing – stories that embrace corruption, disloyalty and darkness.

And still there is space for books that defy categorisation, books such as Robert Galbraith's new The Cuckoo's Calling which embraces the best of traditional mystery fiction, private-eye pace and the kind of writing that reminds me why I love this genre.

Because it's sometimes easier to tell certain truths in a novel than through the lens of journalism or history, future readers who want to understand what living in the UK at the beginning of the 21st century was like will turn to our crime fiction. The main reason is the breadth of the lives we encompass. Murder doesn't just touch one social group. Victims and their friends and families; witnesses; killers; cops; the media – they're all sucked in to our stories, and we learn to understand their lives too.

The flipside of that expansiveness is that there's room for writers whose concern is clearly defined groups within our society. Stuart Neville writes about contemporary Belfast, but everything he says about the present is coloured by the city's history and the way lives have been distorted and disfigured by the Troubles. Anya Lipska has launched a series that promises to take us to the heart of London's Polish community. These novels offer us the exotic within the commonplace.

There are many other strands to this story: thrillers rooted in technology, for example, the inexorable rise of the history mystery and the transformation of the spy novel. If there is one thing we can learn from that last decade of crime fiction it's that there's no limit to the creativity of its practitioners. Which is great news for all readers, not just the thousands who will rub shoulders with their favourite authors at Harrogate.