SEICHO MATSUMOTO was one of Japan’s best known and most significant 20th-century crime writers, credited with leading the break from so-called “puzzle fiction” – locked room mysteries, traditional whodunnits and the like – and instead taking the genre towards social commentary and psychological observation. 

Point Zero (Bitter Lemon, £9.99), first published in 1959, is amongst his key novels. 

Its 26-year-old protagonist marries, via a matchmaker, an advertising salesman 10 years her senior. As Teiko gets to know him a little, her hope grows that it’s a partnership which could work for both of them. But then, after only a couple of weeks of marriage, her husband sets out from Tokyo on a business trip to the north – and vanishes. As Teiko investigates she finds a tragedy with its roots in the post-war US occupation, and the ways in which women, only a generation before her own, survived both war and peace. 

Along with an intriguing mystery, Matsumoto gives an unobtrusive but fascinating lesson in the history and culture of the period between the Japan we know today and its immediate past. 

Magazine writer Molly wakes up in her Lavender Hill flat, in The Murder After The Night Before by Katy Brent (HQ, £9.99), to the most ferocious hangover ever, and with a stranger lying next to her. She remembers very little of the previous evening, so finding out she has become famous overnight – and not in a nice way – leaves her in shock. But she still doesn’t know the worst bit: her flatmate, an investigative journalist, is missing. 

Rude, funny, genuinely touching, and tense throughout – this is good stuff. 

Madison, a star student at Harvard Law School, has the chance of a lifetime, in The Intern by Michele Campbell (HQ, £8.99) – an internship with the legendary Judge Conroy. To put it mildly, Madison doesn’t share the privileged background of most of her fellow students, so this is her one opportunity to network her way into a glittering career. 

There’s a problem, though; Madison’s brother has just been arrested as part of a major narcotics sting. How’s that going to look on her disclosure form? What she doesn’t yet know, is that the judge, too, has secrets. If the pair don’t destroy each other, could they end up saving each other? 

Full of deft touches and clever changes of direction, this is breathlessly exciting from start to finish. 

Two brothers, joint heirs to one of Northumberland’s most violent crime families, are shot dead on their mother’s doorstep in The Longest Goodbye by Mari Hannah (Orion, £9.99). 

It’s a nightmare for DCI Kate Daniels, as the dead men were universally believed to be responsible for killing a much loved police officer. So everybody – the public, the press, Kate’s team, and the gangsters – knows perfectly well that the assassin she’s hunting is almost certainly a cop. 

Hannah is prized for her non-stop narratives, but also for giving readers what feels like an authentic glimpse inside the practical and emotional lives of murder detectives.