THE most anticipated crime novel ever is unavoidably delayed when the author dies halfway through completing the denouement, in The Ending Writes Itself by Evelyn Clarke (HQ, £16.99). Publishers’ careers are at stake, but in the novelist’s vulgar castle on an isolated Scottish island there are no notes, no clues to suggest how he planned to crown his career.

His agent has an idea: invite a group of talented but struggling authors to the island under conditions of strict secrecy and offer untold riches to the one who comes up with the best ending. It might even have worked, if one of their number hadn’t been a homicidal maniac.

Ever since Agatha Christie we’ve enjoyed wondering who’s next for the chop, and which of the survivors is least likely (and therefore certain) to be the killer. This version provides the added delight of a loving mickey-take of genre fiction’s tics and cliches — and a much less loving satire on the modern publishing industry.

Before she became a professor of creative writing, Christie Watson spent many years as a nurse. Which is worrying, since it suggests that Killing Me Softly (Phoenix, £20) is an authentic picture of life in a London hospital’s emergency department: eternal queues, constant crises, chronic understaffing. On top of that, the head nurse has to deal with a suspicious spike in the unit’s mortality rate.

But through all the horrors, and there are plenty, something else shines out: the love of nurses for nursing, and the sheer wonder of what the NHS was, and without deliberate government sabotage could be again.

This exceptional book’s going to be on every best-of-year list come Christmas, not least but not only as a psychological thriller.

It’s a roasting summer in Perth, Western Australia, in The Shark by Emma Styles (Sphere, £25), and a serial killer is haunting a beachside suburb. Two young women, who once met when they were both patients at a mental hospital, are each seeking the killer — in their own different ways, and perhaps for their own different reasons, too. It’s only once they join forces that the whole thing gets horribly out of control.

A cracklingly tense suspenser, The Shark asks one of crime fiction’s eternal questions: how do you hunt a monster without becoming a monster?

If you like your historical fiction inspired by research rather than burdened with it, and featuring historical characters salted among the created ones, you’ll probably enjoy Dana Stabenow’s The Harvey Girl (Head of Zeus, £20). It takes place in the New Mexico Territory of the US in 1890, where white expansionism and robber-baron capitalism push westward as fast as the railroad companies can carry them.

There’s plenty of commerce on this frontier, but little law. Pinkerton Agency detective Clare Wright is placed undercover as a Harvey Girl — a server at the world’s first chain restaurants — to solve a series of train robberies. The mystery element of the novel is enjoyable; the Harvey detail irresistible.