FIRST LIE WINS by Ashley Elston (Headline, £14.99) is set in small-town Louisiana, where among the local elite every tiny indicator of social class is picked over as studiously as the results of a CAT scan.

Evie Porter is struggling to fit in. She’s moved in with Ryan, who is as handsome as he is rich, well respected and well connected. She can’t pretend that she’s from the same moneyed background as he and his friends are, but she does have to find some way of making them all like her. It’s a matter of life or death. And the fact that there’s no such person as Evie Porter is just another complication.

This is a churningly exciting scam thriller, a great heart-starter for the dark new year.

If you believe the crime novels, the small-town US custom of homecoming dances exists mainly to provide an opportunity for the most popular girl in the school to get bumped off.

Fifteen years ago, as SWEET LITTLE LIES by Karin Nordin (HQ, £9.99) opens, Lex’s sister met just such a fate, and Lex’s boyfriend was arrested for the brutal murder. He’s been on death row ever since, and now that a date for his execution has finally been announced he’s contacted Lex to tell her that he’s innocent — and that he knows how she can prove it.

This one has tension and twists all the way through — including on the last page.

FAST CHARLIE by Victor Gischler (Hard Case Crime, £8.99) was originally published in 2001 under the more fitting title Gun Monkeys. The new edition is to tie in with the “major motion picture” of the same name.

A finalist for an Edgar Award in its original guise, this story of a gangster’s journey from anti-hero to lover is stylish, bloody, emotionally engaging and often very funny.

It’s the tale of an enforcer working for an ageing Florida crime boss. Charlie frightens people, hurts people and sometimes kills people for a wage, and “it’s an ugly, hard, shitty way to earn a living,” but he has his rules. One of them, perhaps the most important, is “when you throw in with a guy, you stick with him. Otherwise, you’re just some kind of animal.”

When Charlie’s boss is told by people higher up the food chain that his franchise is being cancelled, because his old-fashioned methods mean he’s failing to maximise potential income from the territory, nobody can really disagree.

The old man is plainly past it. But Charlie threw in with him years ago, and that means that when the boss goes missing Charlie’s going to find him. Even if he has to kill half the hoods in the state to do it.

The reader realises, even if the protagonist probably doesn’t, that his sacred codes of conduct are mostly just apologies he makes to himself for the life he lives. Seeing Charlie struggle and stumble towards a rough kind of redemption is both exciting and in the end surprisingly satisfying.