NOT recommended for the squeamish, the easily shocked or the easily offended, if you think you’ve got the stomach for it Christa Faust’s The Get Off (Hard Case, £9.99) is top-quality modern pulp fiction. 

The protagonist, former porn star Angel Dare, has appeared in two previous novels, knowledge of which is not necessary to enjoy this one. In her third and final outing, Angel’s on the run from the law, and from a social media posse, following a revenge killing that went as wrong as it possibly could. 

She gets entangled with cattle barons and rodeo stars as she makes her way across the USA towards sanctuary in the wildlands near the Canadian border. And although she doesn't mean to do it, everywhere she goes she leaves dead bodies behind her. The advanced pregnancy doesn't exactly help, either. Can someone like Angel really choose to “get off,” and start a new life?

The comfortable tedium of a flat share in the UK’s third dullest town is shattered by the mysterious arrival of a new tenant, in Everyone In The Group Chat Dies by LM Chilton (Head of Zeus, £9.99). 

Newcomer Esme is an amateur detective on social media, and says she’s there to solve the area’s sole claim to fame: a spree killing which took place 30 years ago. But since the killer in question was found dead at the time, the other residents of flat four aren’t that interested. Until Esme goes missing. Chilton knows how to spring some nice twists, alongside lots of well set-up jokes. 

There’s an early scene in Pagans by James Alistair Henry (Moonflower, £16.99) which will remind many readers of Sidney Poitier’s first encounter with the Mississippi police in the classic film of In The Heat Of The Night. 

However, this isn’t the segregated Deep South of America, but an alternative Britain where the Norman Conquest never took place. Our island home is uneasily divided three ways, between the Saxons of the east, the “Tribals” of the West, and the Norse of the far north, secure behind their wall. 

Some have long dreamt of a united kingdom, but big business will do anything to stop it and as ever their first resort is to inflame racial and religious tensions to divide the populace. Two cops — one a Saxon and the other from the far west — must work together to keep the peace and solve a murder.

I found this unusual police procedural greatly enjoyable, with its well thought-through details of difference and similarity between their world and the one we know.

A group of promising young ice skaters are offered the chance of a lifetime, in First To Fall by CL Pattison (Headline, £10.99) — the incredible opportunity to stay with a legendary German skater at his Bavarian schloss and be taught his most famous trick. Naturally, they’re miles from anywhere and snowed in by a blizzard when the murders start. There’s plenty of fun and suspense here, all in a fresh setting.