AMY works as a waitress in a not very smart east London restaurant. One night, in Eyes On You by Adele Parks (HQ, £16.99), a handsome, posh City boy is dining there and she, rather determinedly, persuades him to come out on a date with her.

She’s an unreliable narrator, but honest with the reader about being given to impulsive behaviour and unwise choices, and the trauma she still suffers from being, at the age of 15, the main witness in her father’s murder trial. Oli and Amy make an unlikely couple, but she is convinced that they connect at a deep level. Unfortunately, she’s right.

Once again, Parks has delivered an unhurried psychological thriller with a fully-fleshed protagonist and a story that gradually builds into a storm of revelations and reversals.

The Honourable Member For Murder by David Weir (Allison & Busby, £9.99) is the first in a lighthearted series in which the amateur sleuths are Max and Diana, backroom staff for a useless, gaffe-prone backbench MP.

The only promotion their frustrated boss has ever managed to wangle is as chair of the all-party group on miscarriages of justice. When a woman whose mother is serving a sentence for murdering her father claims to have seen the deceased walking along the pier at Cromer, Max and Diana take up the case.

There’s plenty of fun here, along with a revealing view of our crumbling parliamentary system written by a former insider.

Ambitious TV producer Chloe, once a high-flyer, now endures the drudgery of the nocturnal news shift, in The Bad Mother by CJ Parsons (HQ, £9.99). A few years ago, while reporting on a newborn snatched from a hospital, her contempt for ethical guidelines led her to take a terrible gamble which ruined an innocent woman’s life and — more to the point, as far as the unrepentant Chloe is concerned — derailed her own career. Now she’s stumbled onto a new lead in that same case. Can she use it to get back in her bosses’ good books?

Ruthless moguls and merciless media types clash in a neat, anti-heroic twist on the investigative journalists usually found in suspense stories.

It’s a common complaint that not enough current fiction is written about the world of work by its actual inhabitants. But Ryan Lowell’s debut novel, Freight (Hachette, £15.99), is certainly autobiographical enough to meet those criticisms. This book is pure trench art, a direct report from the front line of late-stage capitalism.

The central character is an overnight dispatcher for a trucking company in Maine, a job which Lowell worked for several years. It’s the dispatcher’s job to keep his drivers safe on their long, lonely journeys, to keep them on time and, if possible, to keep them sane. Plenty can go wrong on the road, and this particular night is going to prove it.

With an economical writing style, lifelike dialogue and a believable but unpredictable crime plot, the author creates that authentic Monday morning mood.