The Hunted Gabriel Bergmoser Faber, £8.99, pp288 Gabriel Bergmoser’s short, shocking debut is less thriller than black-as-pitch descent into nightmare. It opens with Frank, who runs a petrol station hours from the nearest town in a desolate patch of Australia “too grassy to be a desert, too ugly to mean anything to a tourist, too dry to be farming lands”. His granddaughter Allie is reluctantly staying with him, and the pair are together when an old car veers on to the forecourt, the driver coated head to foot in dried mud and blood. Bergmoser proceeds to show us how she got there. How a young backpacker named Simon picked up a mysterious and beautiful girl, Maggie. How she persuaded him to turn “off the beaten track” to “see something genuine”, the real Australia. How they ran into locals holding shotguns, who invited them back for a barbie, and how he said yes despite his better instincts. “He couldn’t help but feel claustrophobic as the darkness grew deeper, creeping around them like shadows strung between the too-close gums.” This slice of outback noir quickly begins to spiral into a very dark place indeed, in a story that is at once exhilarating, gleefully vicious and totally, race-to-the-finish-line unputdownable. The Search Party Simon Lelic Viking, £9.99, pp352 Five teenagers set off into the woods to find their missing friend, Sadie. The police have mounted a huge search, but the friends – Abi, Sadie’s boyfriend Mason, Cora, Fash and Luke, Sadie’s twin brother – think they’re looking in the wrong place, and may well know more than they’re letting on. Simon Lelic’s book opens with a panicked 999 call, and with the discovery of four of the searchers, and the body of a child. DI Robin Fleet, who has traumatic links to the small town himself, is racing to find out what happened to the dead child, as well as to find Sadie, as the rain pours down. Told through the teenagers’ interviews with the police, as well as from Fleet’s perspective, this is skilful and compelling. “Because that’s the thing, you see. They made out like they were doing it for Sadie, but that wasn’t what was going on at all. They were lying. Every one of them,” says Abi. “Cora, Fash, Mason, even Luke, probably – they were lying right from the start.” Final Cut SJ Watson Doubleday, £12.99, pp416 SJ Watson had a huge bestseller with his debut novel, Before I Go to Sleep, in which a woman has a form of amnesia that reduces her memory to the past 24 hours. Final Cut also deals with memory and trauma, following Alex, a film-maker who wants to look at life in an English village, with people uploading their own videos of their everyday comings and goings. She ends up in Blackwood Bay, a northern community with a backstory that will please her boss: two, or possibly three, girls have vanished from the village over the past decade. Alex has a secret backstory of her own, which coming to Blackwood Bay will reveal. Watson moves between past and present as he unravels the mystery at the heart of the community: a history in which a girl found on a beach is being treated for dissociative fugue with dissociative amnesia, and a present in which Alex is asking questions about the disappearance of the girls. “Nothing is quite as I remember it; it’s as if I’m seeing it through a filter, a distorting prism,” she says. “I know the sea is out there, ahead and below us, there’s that familiar smell, of oil and seaweed, salty and sulphurous.” The reader begins to suspect the reality of Alex’s past just as she does, with Watson adroitly bringing the strands of his story together to create a disturbing journey to a shocking truth. Midnight at Malabar House Vaseem Khan Hodder & Stoughton, £16.99, pp336 This is the first in a new historical crime series from Vaseem Khan, author of the excellent Baby Ganesh Agency novels. Opening on 31 December 1949 in Bombay, it follows Insp Persis Wadia, India’s first female police detective, as she fights both to prove herself (her appointment is greeted with hysteria, with newspapers claiming that “in temperament, intelligence and moral fibre, the female of the species is, and always will be, inferior to the male”) and to solve the murder of the English diplomat Sir James Herriot. Persis, a wonderful creation, keeps a clipping of the damning newspaper report on her desk, dismissing critics with ease. “For millennia, we have been told what our role must be: wife, mother, daughter. We are all those things, but we are so much more. Men like you think you can stop us. Go ahead and try. Have you ever tried to stop the monsoon?” A beautifully complex plot and an Agatha Christie-ish denouement make for a thoroughly satisfying read, and a burning desire to see what’s next for Persis. • To order The Hunted, The Search Party, Final Cut or Midnight at Malabar House go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15