Cardiff psychotherapist Jess Mayhew takes on a worrying new client in Charlotte Williams’s Black Valley (Macmillan, £14.99), a young artist suffering from disabling claustrophobia following the death of her mother who was apparently killed when she surprised a burglar at her daughter’s studio.

Jess becomes convinced that there’s more to the unsolved case, both clinically and criminally. Somehow it’s all linked to the emergence of a reclusive new artist, an ex-miner whose work attacks capitalism’s ruination of the valley communities.

Atmospheric and full of insight, this is a psychological mystery in which, for once, non-sensationalised psychology really is the key.