Crime fiction: Deliriously unpleasant characters and devilish plots

In a persuasive essay in the Atlantic this month, Terrence Rafferty suggests that the reason women are increasingly writing the most compelling crime fiction might be because they "don't much believe in heroes, which makes their kind of storytelling perhaps a better fit for these cynical times".

Heroes are certainly thin on the ground in The Darkest Secret (Sphere, £7.99), Alex Marwood's enthralling new novel. The book begins with a series of witness statements taken after a three-year-old girl, Coco Jackson, has apparently been snatched from a drunken weekend party.

Ten years later, Coco’s father, millionaire builder Sean Jackson, dies suddenly and as Coco’s surviving twin, Ruby, and her half-sister Milly make their way to his funeral, they begin to discover that the official version of Coco’s disappearance is a lie.

Cutting expertly from past to present among a cast of deliriously unpleasant characters, Marwood’s devilishly plotted tale arrives at an unexpectedly moving, human climax before its utterly devastating epilogue.

Marwood writes wittily about the monstrous Sean Jackson, whose speciality is stripping distinctive old houses of their antiquity and making them "horribly, painfully perfect". He fills them with furniture, "things with no handles, things with no frills; the sorts of characterless, expensive things the newly minted, still unsure of their taste, like to buy in shops they know are safe". Noticing a roll of fat on the small of his daughter's back, "Sean doesn't approve of women who don't look after themselves. It's the least they can do, frankly." As much a black comedy of contemporary bad manners as psychological thriller, The Darkest Secret is a triumph and a treat.

As we learned in Unravelling Oliver, Liz Nugent doesn't much believe in heroes either. She also has quite a way with a memorable opening line: "My husband did not mean to kill Annie Doyle, but the lying tramp deserved it" is how Lydia Fitzsimons begins Nugent's absorbing new novel, Lying in Wait (Penguin, £12.99). Lydia, whose desiccated south Dublin gentility barely conceals her delirious instability, shares the narrative with her son, Laurence, and Annie's sister, Karen.

Once she has finished the girl off with a blow from a Krooklok, Lydia takes charge. The Fitszsimons family lives in Avalon, Lydia’s ancestral home; their large rear garden is not overlooked, and Lydia knows “exactly the spot she could be buried”: on the site of an ornamental pond which Daddy had filled in after Lydia’s sister’s death in childhood.

With Karen determined to find out what happened to Annie, and Laurence convinced his father is up to no good, the skeletons emerge from their closets with pleasing regularity. Nugent moves the action surefootedly across location and social class; her prose is fluent and propulsive, her characters are complex and credible. Redolent of Highsmith and Du Maurier, and with a distinct nod to Ira Levin's A Kiss Before Dying, Lying in Wait is an ingenious and accomplished suspense novel whose ending is as bleak as anything I've read this year.

Stuart Neville's So Say the Fallen (Harvill Secker, £12.99) sees the return of DCI Serena Flanagan, whose debut outing, Those We Left Behind, was one of 2015's outstanding titles. With her marriage under strain and her children unhappy, police work is Flanagan's only solace. Under political pressure to sign off on the apparent suicide of a disabled local car dealer, Flanagan notes the unusual position of family photographs at the otherwise clean crime scene and the widow's close relationship with the local rector, Rev Peter McKay, and elects to continue her investigation, a decision that will ultimately put her in mortal danger.

Cutting between Flanagan and McKay, So Say the Fallen is haunted by fearfulness, anxiety and regret. Of uncertain faith, Flanagan finds herself praying, and turns to McKay for advice. Unbeknownst to her, McKay has lost his faith entirely, and loathes himself for going through the motions, "as much out of pity for his parishioners as a desire to keep his job".

Meticulous in its depiction of a ruthless, deeply disturbed and manipulative killer, Neville has given us a thoughtful, atmospheric novel and, in Flanagan, a low-key, all-too-human hero for our times.

"That night I sautéed hot Italian sausage with brown mushrooms, minced garlic, stewed tomatoes, fresh basil leaves, dried oregano and scallion greens." It could only be Easy Rawlins, back for the 13th time in Charcoal Joe (Weidenfield & Nicolson, £19.99) and as engaging as ever.

Sustaining a successful series is a balancing act between the new and the familiar, and Walter Mosley is a master of the art. Charcoal Joe delivers a plot of Chandlerian complexity, with enough gunmen and femmes fatales to satisfy the most demanding noir connoisseur, but the real joys of Easy lie elsewhere: in the food, the sex, the potions from Mama Joe, the supporting cast (Jackson Blue, Feather, Fearless Jones, Mouse – Mouse!), and in lines such as “The sentinel was sitting in shadow but I knew where he was by the now-and-then glow of his cigarette”.

Before the Fall (Hodder & Stoughton, £14.99), Noah Howley's fourth novel, begins with a private plane on a runway in Martha's Vineyard. The flight will last 16 minutes before crashing in the ocean. Of the 11 passengers, only two will survive: Scott Burroughs, a burnt-out artist in recovery, and JJ, the four-year-old son of David Bateman, who ran a Fox News-style cable network called ALC and whose aircraft it was.

Burroughs swims to shore with JJ on his shoulders and becomes an instant and reluctant hero. But Bill Milligan, a Glenn Beck-style ranter at ALC, thinks Burroughs is a phoney and a sleazebag and maybe even a murderer, and he says so, loudly and repeatedly, on television – and soon, the FBI starts to agree.

Before the Fall has a suspenseful plot, and you certainly turn the pages to find out what happens next, but it is as a Bonfire of the Vanities-style novel of the zeitgeist that it excels. The toxic nexus between media and celebrity and the grotesque wealth of the 1 per cent are among Howley's subjects, and he captures them with scalpel-sharp accuracy and dry wit. (A banker has a separate wine fridge in his kitchen with "fifteen bottles of champagne on ice at all times, in case a New Year's Eve party broke out unexpectedly".)

Above all, it's the story of Burroughs, of a broken man's search for some kind of redemption. Before the Fall is an absolutely mesmerising book; I found myself reading it while walking down the street because I couldn't bear to be parted from it.

Declan Hughes's latest novel is All the Things You Are