THE HEATHENS by Ace Atkins (Corsair, £9.99) is the latest in the series about Sheriff Quinn Colson, whose bailiwick is a rural county in Mississippi. When a local white women is murdered, opinion in town is that her rumbustious teenage daughter did it, possibly in cahoots with her boyfriend, who is not only a petty villain, but black as well.

The young couple go on the lam in a series of stolen cars, leaving the sheriff, who’s pretty sure they’re not guilty, to catch them before they manage to get themselves killed.

Brutal, shocking, suspenseful and funny, there’s always a whiff of the freak show about these books, with almost every character being a grotesque or an eccentric, living in a land that seems to be 200 years behind the rest of the world.

The reader is saved from the shame of voyeurism, however, by the honest compassion of both author and protagonist.

Nottinghamshire GP Andy lies to the police, in The Curfew by TM Logan (Zaffre, £8.99), who ask him whether his son was home when he was supposed to be. He doesn’t feel comfortable doing so, he knows it’s wrong, but he also knows that his boy is a good lad.

However, the reason the police are interested in Connor is because he was one of five teens who went out that night to celebrate the end of exams with booze, dope and secrets — and only four of them have been seen since.

The “every parent’s worst nightmare” sub-genre of thriller always hinges on the same question — “How far would you go to protect your child?” — but this one features a record number of cunning and compelling twists.

The chronicles of turn-of-the-century cop, Tom Harper, continue with A Dark Steel Death by Chris Nickson (Severn House, £20.99). We’ve now reached winter 1916, and Harper is acting chief constable of Leeds.

Wartime manpower shortages mean resorting to female volunteers patrolling the streets, though their main preoccupation seems to be stopping courting couples from public canoodling. And now a saboteur is attacking military targets in the city; is it an agent of a foreign power, or a disgruntled ex-Tommy?

This is a police procedural in the shape of a tense manhunt, with an engaging central character and an author who uses a light touch to convincingly recreate a place and period.

Such A Good Mother by Helen Monks Takhar (HQ, £14.99) is set in an unspecified British city, where Rose has seen the neighbourhood she’s lived in all her life transformed by well-heeled trendies who’ve settled there like an occupying army.

There’s no place for ordinary people any more, but Rose isn’t giving up: if she can just get her son into the non-fee-paying but elite local school, perhaps all isn’t lost. The trouble is there are mothers who’ll kill for their spot in The Woolf Academy’s pecking order — literally, as it turns out.

Gentrification and class war are at the heart of this breathtakingly gripping thriller.