RECOVERING from their mother’s attempted suicide, young sisters Caroline and Joanna spend the summer of 1990 at their great-aunt’s quiet Cotswold cottage in A Place to Lie by Rebecca Griffiths (Sphere, £19.99).

But what might have been an idyllic break from their harsh reality ends in horror, in a village tainted by sad secrets and terrible passions. Nearly 30 years later, a tragic accident takes Joanna back to Witchwood, where she finds answers to questions she might have been better off not asking.

Eerie and tense, this is a story of love and hate between friends and siblings, and the unbridgeable barrier of mutual incomprehension between the adult world and that of childhood.

The Sentence Is Death by Anthony Horowitz (Century, £20) is a treat for those who like whodunnits cooked to a traditional recipe, where the clues are laid out in full sight and only the author’s cunning use of distraction can prevent the reader reaching the solution to the mystery before the detective does.

The conceit here is that Horowitz is a character in his own novel, which is presented as the result of a money-making arrangement in which the author plays amanuensis and sidekick to a London private eye named Hawthorne, who might charitably be called unknowable and, less charitably, unlikeable.

In this second case for the duo, the baffled and understaffed police are forced to hire Hawthorne as a consultant when a high-profile divorce lawyer is bashed to death at his Hampstead house after being publicly threatened by a feminist haiku poet.

Set in London in 1930 — a city of recession, deadly smog, jazz music and ostentatious wealth — Gallows Court by Martin Edwards (Head of Zeus, £18.99) is a fabulous melodrama, atmospheric and entertaining.

Its main protagonist is a young woman who, having inherited a fortune from her father — a notorious hanging judge — is busy arranging the deaths of various leading citizens while posing as an amateur sleuth.

A novice crime reporter, ignorant of her true nature, is convinced that an interview with Rachel Savernake, London's most mysterious heiress, would cement his position in Fleet Street. But she is a woman on a mission and the closer he gets to her, the more danger he is in.

In Lina Bengtsdotter’s For the Missing (Orion, £14.99), DI Charlie Lager is sent from Stockholm to lead the search for a missing teenager in a small blue-collar town where the local cops are struggling to cope with a case that’s making national headlines.

What she neglects to tell her boss is that this is the very same town she grew up in and that there are very good reasons why she hasn’t returned since she was 14.

I do sometimes wonder if all Nordic crime fiction features self-destructive detectives tortured by their secret pasts, or if it’s only the ones that get translated into English. Despite the cliched Swedish grimness, this debut novel is intelligent and arresting. And grim.