A LUXURY yacht, repossessed from its millionaire owner following a bank crash, arrives in Reykjavik harbour with no-one aboard in The Silence Of The Sea by Yrsa Sigurdardottir (Hodder, £7.99).

As well as a small crew, the boat should have carried the man in charge of the repossession, along with his wife and two children. It’s his parents who hire local lawyer Thora Gudmundsdottir to find out whether their son is dead or alive.

As we’ve come to expect from Nordic crime fiction this seaborne thriller, with a twist reminiscent of classic whodunits, is a chilling and rather cheerless read. But if you’ve developed a taste for icy stories from Europe’s far north, you definitely won’t want to miss this one.

Pharmaceutical companies have no interest in finding a cure for malaria because it’s not a disease that people in rich countries tend to suffer from.

But supposing that situation suddenly changed? That’s the intriguing concept behind Bite by Nick Louth (Sphere, £7.99), in which a young British scientist is about to deliver a paper to a conference in Amsterdam which will revolutionise the treatment of malaria.

But, hours before her big moment, she disappears.

In the unlikely event that you needed any more convincing that health and the profit motive don’t work well together, this exciting conspiracy thriller will provide it.

Commander Morel of the Paris police is on holiday in Cambodia, his mother’s native land, in Death In the Rainy Season by Anna Jaquiery (Mantle, £16.99), when he’s summoned to Phnom Penh to investigate a murder.

The charismatic leader of a humanitarian NGO has been killed in a hotel room and, since he’s related to a French government minister, everyone wants to find a quick and unembarrassing solution to his puzzling death.

Concentrating on the relationships between variously troubled characters in a fascinating ex-pat setting, this mystery novel also gives an atmospheric picture of modern Cambodia.

Lucky London twins Jamie and Tom are at the heart of The Replacement by Patrick Redmond (Sphere, £8.99).

They are charming, good-looking, expensively educated and headed for great things in their careers.

But there is a worm inside the apple — only one of the brothers is truly valued by their ruthless, snobbish parents and it’s been like that since they were babies. Both of them know it, and in their different ways, both resent it.

When a shocking discovery completely rearranges the geometry of their relationships with each other, and with their relatives, friends and lovers, the result is an ever-shifting web of agendas, alliances and paranoia which can only end in bloodshed.

There are moments when this gripping psychological thriller reads a bit like an upper-middle class version of EastEnders, with every conversation producing a row, every motive being misunderstood and every attempt at reconciliation ending in disaster.

But the skilful way in which the author forces the reader to constantly switch sympathies from one character to another is extraordinarily clever and rather unsettling.