THE BLUE HOUR by Paula Hawkins (Doubleday, £22) is a contemporary gothic novel set on a tidal island which is cut off from the Scottish mainland for much of every day. Its sole dwelling was home to the late Vanessa, a reclusive artist, and her companion, Grace, a prickly, lonely woman, dedicated to Vanessa and now a jealous guardian of her memory. But she’s also, we gradually realise, resentful, ever-sensitive to treachery real or imagined, and full of secrets.

A key feature of this style of story is doom-laden inevitability; you know from the start that no-one’s getting out alive — or, if alive, then certainly not happy. That either appeals or not, depending on taste. But few readers will be unmoved by a plot built around the inequities that have shaped the lives of the characters. Hawkins examines not only rich vs poor, posh vs common and men vs women, but also, far more unusually and daringly, the power imbalance between the beautiful and the ugly.

Simon Kernick’s latest concept thriller is You All Die Tonight (Headline, £20), in which seven people wake up in rural Essex, trapped in a remote mansion. The only thing they have in common is that they were involved, innocently or otherwise, with a notorious unsolved murder four years earlier.

A voice from a speaker in the ceiling informs them that they have all been injected with a slow but deadly toxin. If the murderer confesses, the rest will be given the antidote and released. But if not...

Fast, exciting, often surprising, and entirely believable while you’re caught up in it — which, after all, is what matters.

Heather walks out of a meeting at the start of A Bird In Winter by Louise Doughty (Faber, £9.99), out of her Birmingham workplace, out of the city and out of her old life.

She’s been preparing for this moment for some time and she has plans in place to help her disappear, but of course you can’t really be prepared for leaving everything behind. You can sort out burner phones and a cash stash and a change of underwear, but there is no preparation for the watchful hours and days on your own, with nothing to do but look back on the influences, events, mistakes and betrayals that landed you where you are.

This must be the best spy story of the year, as psychologically insightful as it is exquisitely suspenseful.

If you’re longing for a wholly satisfying Golden Age-style whodunnit, fully and fairly clued, and with every revelation followed by another twist, you need the 1930s-set Rachel Savernake series by Martin Edwards. In the latest episode, Hemlock Bay (Head of Zeus, £22), the enigmatic amateur criminologist and her unorthodox entourage are at an upmarket seaside resort where murder and blackmail are merely the surface problems.

It concludes with the once-traditional list of the clues in the text which would have told you the outcome before the final page, if you’d been paying attention.