The Searcher by Tana French; These Women by Ivy Pochoda; The Butcher of Berner Street by Alex Reeve; The Package by Sebastian Fitzek; One By One by Ruth Ware
Author of the Dublin Murder Squad series Tana French has described her second standalone, The Searcher (Viking, £14.99), as her take on a western, and the lone stranger who rides into town to right wrongs and generally disrupt the place is a classic Frontier-era theme. American Cal Hooper, formerly of the Chicago PD, has bought himself a fixer-upper in a remote village in the west of Ireland with the intention of settling down to a quiet life. His days are largely taken up with renovations, trying to understand the local customs and responding cautiously to inquiries about his marital status, when a scruffy local kid who has taken to hanging around his property asks for help in finding a vanished older sibling. Divorced, and missing his now grown-up daughter, Cal finds himself drawn to Trey and gets involved even though, without the necessary authority and tools of the trade, he is out on a limb. The local police don’t regard 19-year-old Brendan’s disappearance as suspicious, and the villagers are tight-lipped on the subject … The pace of Cal’s investigation takes a while to pick up, and most of the action is in the final third of the book, but as well as containing strong characters, beautiful descriptions and some genuinely eerie moments, The Searcher poses uncomfortable questions about morality, retribution and masculinity.