THE INVESTIGATION by JM Lee, translated from the Korean by Chi Young Kim (Pan, £7.99), takes place in 1944 in Fukuoka Prison, Japan, home to Korean independence supporters, communists and other enemies of the emperor.

A notoriously brutal guard is murdered and a teenage conscript is ordered to investigate. To his astonishment he finds that the dead man’s life had recently become entangled with that of another inmate, a dissident poet.

A gripping war story and a genuinely mysterious whodunnit, this astonishing novel is also a sustained argument for the practical, material power and importance of words and particularly of reading.

In English-language fiction these days it’s rare to encounter a writer willing — or perhaps able — to wear their heart on their sleeve to such an extent.

Without hiding behind irony, metaphor or fantasy, Lee dares to put forward his ideas with unfiltered passion and irresistible certainty.

Adam and his neighbours are conscious that they live a version of the American Dream in Harlan Coben’s latest stand-alone thriller The Stranger (Orion, £19.99).

Their small New Jersey town is full of lawyers and hedge fund managers who’ve escaped the city to live in peace and plenty in a family-friendly environment.

Then, one night in a bar, a stranger tells Adam a secret that threatens to break his family apart.

This isn’t Coben’s most believable storyline but there’s plenty of excitement and always one more twist to come.

Anyone compiling an Encyclopaedia of 20th-century pretensions would have to include a chapter on the strange obsession which left-wing French intellectuals developed for US gangster fiction.

The result was the “roman noir” and “neo-polar” crime stories written in a stripped-down style, full of stereotyped, alienated characters doing each other relentless and inevitable harm of various sorts, without allowing too much actual plot to get in the way.

According to a foreword by David Peace, the author of Fatale (Serpent’s Tail, £8.99) Jean-Patrick Manchette was a “red” writer, not merely a “left” writer, and he’s frequently compared to the US communist crime novelist Dashiell Hammett.

To be frank, I detected more PG Wodehouse than Karl Marx in this nonetheless impressive and enjoyable dark farce.

It’s about a young woman who turns up in backwater French towns and uses her charm, intelligence and anger to stir up the contradictions and tensions among the local bourgeoisie.

Having got them all at each other’s throats, she manipulates the situation so that it ends with her much richer — and them mostly dead.

DI Tom Thorne and DS Helen Weeks are on holiday in Time Of Death by Mark Billingham (Little Brown, £18.99), when the husband of an old school friend of Helen’s is arrested for kidnapping two schoolgirls in Warwickshire.

Is he innocent?

And, if so, can Tom and Helen prove it against the hostility of the local police?

The plot element on which this gruesome mystery turns is certainly one of the cleverest and most satisfying that I’ve read for ages.