JANE HARPER’s latest small-town-Australia mystery, Last One Out (Macmillan, £20), unfolds in a community undergoing the last rites. Carralon was once a thriving, self-reliant place, where neighbours looked after each other and happy children played footie and cricket in the sun. But it’s gradually been absorbed by a mining operation, noisy and dirty — and ruthless. Its inhabitants’ solidarity is fractured as some accept the inevitable and sell their homes, farms and businesses to the expanding corporation, while diehards damn them as traitors.

Ro, the town’s former GP, returns from Sydney for the fifth anniversary of her son’s unsolved disappearance. She doesn’t know if he’s alive or dead, but she does believe that somewhere in this sad, dying district someone has the answers. The pace is well judged as a slow-burner builds to a dramatic final act.

Suspended from the police and trapped in a personal war with one of Liverpool’s biggest crime families, Mark’s predicament moves from bad to terrifying when he wakes up in a hotel room next to a dead body, in Liar Liar by Luca Veste (Avon, £9.99), with no memory of what happened.

While he’s on the run trying to prove his innocence, not least to himself, his former colleagues are investigating a corpse unearthed at a gang-owned property. As they begin to realise Mark’s involvement in whatever is going on, the question tormenting them is whether they’ll be able to find him in time to save his life, let alone his career.

Exciting from start to finish, this cross between a gangster saga and a police procedural delivers some genuine surprises.

Cheered on by the public, someone’s murdering corrupt billionaires in The Killing Code by Steve Frech (HQ, £9.99). Atlanta detectives Somerset and Foles believe the evil dead belong in a courtroom, not a morgue: their job is to catch killers, no matter how unlovable the victim. But the self-appointed avenger is clever — and he has a plan.

A subtle touch in this fun-filled suspenser is that the killer isn’t trying to overthrow the system, just correct it. Naively, he dreams that by punishing greed he can reset capitalism from Nasty to Nice.

A wandering childhood with a paranoid mother has left 19-year-old Odette unequipped to face life alone in the world. But at the beginning of We Know What You Did by Kirsty Lockwood (Orion, £20), her mum’s funeral is over and she must learn to negotiate the housing system and the ways of the jobseeker. She’s not too good with people, but she’s strong, brave and willing to learn.

The self-help gurus all say she must be proactive in seeking a social life, so at a Glasgow museum she determinedly befriends Amos, a cultured, well-off psychologist in his eighties. It seems like an alliance made in heaven, or at least Hollywood — and yet here Odette is months later, covered in blood and under arrest for murdering Amos.

Lockwood’s whydunnit debut is truly chilling, and hard to keep away from.