The perfect read for winter's extra-dark nights, The Wicked Hour takes readers back to the Salem-inspired town of Burning Lake, New York, where every Halloween night culminates in the burning of effigies of witches and over-the-top celebration. This Halloween, it also leads to the murder of Morgan Chambers, a talented young violinist.

It’s necessary to read the first book in the Natalie Lockhart series, Trace of Evil, to fully grasp the events of The Wicked Hour. A police detective, Natalie is still traumatized from the events of the prior novel, where she solved a heartbreaking cold case that changed her view of the Burning Lakes community. Natalie has isolated herself from her family and from her boss, a man she’s fallen in love with. She spends her time renovating her old home and throwing herself into her work.

When Morgan Chambers’ body is pulled from a dumpster, Natalie is heartbroken to see the young woman discarded like trash. As she works the case and delves deeper into the highly competitive world of professional music, she remembers a missing persons case close to her heart. Natalie’s teenage friend, Bella, was also a talented violinist who disappeared. Like Morgan, Bella was being crushed under the pressure to succeed in a world that demanded constant sacrifice and competition. Unlike Morgan, Bella was deemed a runaway, but now Natalie is questioning that explanation.

Though both Trace of Evil and The Wicked Hour are tightly paced thrillers, The Wicked Hour keeps the spooky setting of Burning Lake and its Halloween celebration as a backdrop to murder, with less of a focus on the occult than series readers may expect. Instead, The Wicked Hour is a carefully plotted procedural that invites readers to examine each clue along with Natalie. As those clues come together and the novel progresses toward its climax, readers will be rewarded with a suspenseful and memorable finale.

Serial killer Christopher Masters terrorized London in 2012 with a string of abductions and murders. His final victim, Holly Kemp, was never found, but eyewitness testimony placed her in connection with Masters. Six years later, Holly’s body is discovered near Cambridge. It should be easy work for Detective Constable Cat Kinsella and her partner to tie up this loose end and close the case once and for all. From this simple premise, the artfully paced Shed No Tears merely follows the clues, and things go from surprising to shocking.

Readers familiar with Caz Frear’s series know that Cat Kinsella comes from a family involved with organized crime. Her significant relationships are held together with a complex web of lies, so even the true-to-life scenes of normal work camaraderie are shot through with tension. Frear adds a layer of complication by introducing a Detective Chief Inspector who worked the original Masters case and takes a interest in Cat’s career trajectory. Cat wants to please her new mentor, but her dogged commitment seems to be having the opposite effect. Frear affords real respect to the dull, often repetitive nature of investigation, so each revelation feels earned and adds to the suspense.

It’s possible to read this book without having read the rest of the series, but you’ll just end up wanting to start from the beginning because these characters are a pleasure to discover; even incidental roles are fleshed out enough to feel real. Cat works hard to undo some of her family legacy but keeps making choices that tie her ever more firmly to her past. That combination allows her to empathize with victims and the accused alike, which is a real asset on the job. It forces her to keep an open mind, even to unsettling possibilities. (It also helps that she can ask her father about doings in the criminal underworld—not that she’s guaranteed a straight answer.) The story follows her calm, methodical approach, and Frear’s tight control of the reins keeps the tension high. Shed No Tears grabs the reader and doesn’t let go.

San Francisco’s Fabian Gardens is a funky, desirable neighborhood at the heart of Susan Cox’s second Theophonia Bogart mystery, The Man in the Microwave Oven. People of all demographics inhabit its low-rise buildings and enjoy the private park through which the life of the neighborhood flows. Dog walks, gardening get-togethers, friendly chats and pointed arguments all take place on the benches, along the pathways and amid the flowers.

Lately, neighborhood gossip’s focused on one thing: a developer’s mission to put a high-rise in their quirky neighborhood, an endeavor championed by local resident Katrina Dermody. Katrina isn’t well-liked, to say the least. She’s a brash, rude lawyer, prone to fits of rage and unrepentant blackmail attempts. When she’s murdered, no one is really surprised—not even Theo, who discovers Katrina’s battered and bloody body.

Alas, this isn’t even the worst thing that’s happened since Theo moved to Fabian Gardens a year ago, as per Cox’s The Man on the Washing Machine (2015) with its murders and other felonies. Although Theo and her cohorts found relative peace after those wild goings-on, she’s still feeling immense stress because of her big secret. She fled her native England after a family tragedy that drew relentless paparazzi attention and has been keeping her identity secret from her neighbors, friends and boyfriend ever since.

Katrina’s murder adds a new urgency. She threatened blackmail just before her death, and Theo wants to know exactly what Katrina (and the murderer) might’ve learned about her. A former paparazzo herself, Theo uses her skills to solve the mystery, which becomes exponentially more complex when she learns her grandfather is a former spy and a viable murder suspect.

Cox keeps the story moving breathlessly along, mixing suspense and humor with a dash of fascinating old-school spycraft as Theo strives to unearth the truth about what’s happening in her own backyard . . . and her friend’s microwave (Warning: it’s gruesome!). The Man in the Microwave Oven is an entertaining, often outright funny mystery that winningly combines traditional and modern methods of crime-solving, ponders whether it’s ever acceptable to lie and warmly conveys the value of friendship and family even as dead bodies turn up all over town.

Much like her previous standalone novel, The Witch Elm, Tana French’s The Searcher meanders its way into a mystery with a deliberate patience. Cal Hooper is an outsider in his rural Irish town, and before he can be ensnared by a missing person case, Cal—and by extension the reader—must get his footing in his new community. It’s this nuance, a signature of French’s writing, that makes this novel more than just a mystery; it’s also an exploration of rural poverty and the closely intertwined lives of people who are just trying to scratch out a living.

Cal is a former Chicago detective burned out from his job, licking his wounds after his divorce and struggling to reconnect with his adult daughter. His decision to move to Ireland and fix up a ramshackle farmhouse feels impulsive, but Cal is almost immediately centered by the beautiful landscape and by the kindness of his neighbors. Gossip gets around through, and soon Cal finds 13-year-old Trey Reddy on his doorstep. Trey’s 19-year-old brother Brendan has vanished and Trey believes that he’s been met with foul play.

The Irish police, and indeed Brendan’s own mother, believe Brendan left of his volition. The Reddys are poor, Brendan didn’t make it into college, and his girlfriend recently broke up with him. With few prospects, it’s reasonable to assume that he fled to Dublin like many teens before him. Trey’s insistence rattles something in Cal, however, and as he begins a quiet investigation into Brendan's disappearance, he realizes that his tiny community is full of secrets and people who don’t want Brendan found. French scrapes away at the idyllic landscape of rural Ireland and reveals the vices that plague every village and town, including drugs like methamphetamine. As the book progresses, Cal’s idyllic country adventure begins to rot around the edges.

What sets The Searcher apart from French’s earlier novels is its depiction of how deeply intertwined the residents of the village are—with young people leaving the area, farms struggling and poverty and drug use plaguing the area, each person is somehow dependent on his or her neighbors for survival. This is not a place where Cal can bury his head in the sand. Evocative and lyrical, The Searcher is a mystery worth reading slowly to savor every perfectly rendered detail.

Cass Neary is hard-up for cash and stranded in London when she hears about a rare book deal and attends the sale out of curiosity. The meeting turns deadly, and she learns that the book may have powers beyond our understanding. In the chaos that follows, Cass explores the resurgent white nationalist movement in Europe and Scandinavia, confronts her own past trauma and relies on her keen photographer’s eye as she searches for truth. The Book of Lamps and Banners is a hair-raising, mind-bending trip.

You can definitely enjoy this book on its own terms, but if at all possible, find and devour the first in the Cass Neary series, Generation Loss. (You’ll have nightmares, but I promise it’s worth it.) Author Elizabeth Hand does not shy away from bleak, unlikable characters, including her protagonist. Cass is strung out on speed and alcohol, so when she starts ranting about an app that turns people into murderers, the people around her justifiably roll their eyes. Quinn, a boyfriend from her days as a photographer in New York’s punk demimonde, enables her destruction but tries to soften its impact.

Past and present keep smashing together, as do reality and the mind-warping effects of the sought-after book. Hand’s language tightens when Cass spies a detail nobody else notices, but we feel the dead weight of her hangovers and the cranked-up jangle of her nerves. It’s unsettling but impossible to look away as elements line up to set a grim climax in motion.

Does this sound impossibly dark? It is! It’s also exquisitely suspenseful, and the paranoia suffusing the story is very much of our present moment. The idea that any single source can make sense of everything happening around us is as alluring as it is dangerous. Half of the mystery in The Book of Lamps and Banners is wondering whether Cass Neary will save us or take us down with her.

Part suspense tale, part Joy Luck Club and part Sophie’s Choice, The Devil of Nanking is a lyrical novel in which secrets foreshadow the undoing of their bearers, and exposure of the secrets offers redemption. History, folklore and ancient taboos are interwoven seamlessly with the modern-day mystery, which begins when Grey, a young Englishwoman, arrives penniless in Tokyo, nursing a major obsession. Grey, of course, is not her real name. She acquired it from a bedmate at a hospital some years before: “I was grey. Thin and white and a little bit see-through. Nothing at all left alive in me. A ghost.” A ghost with an obsession, however: a scholar’s urge to acquire a rare bit of film footage from the 1937 Nanking massacre.

Before the beginning of World War II, the Imperial Japanese Army had invaded China. By winter of 1937, the army had reached Nanking. The atrocities were unspeakable; by some accounts more than 400,000 Chinese were murdered, piled in a mountain of corpses at the city’s edge. More than five decades have passed, but Grey feels that the key to her search lies with Dr. Shi Chongming, a guest lecturer at Todai University in Tokyo, who had been a resident of Nanking at the time of the massacre. In between meetings with the standoffish professor, Grey must find a way to make some quick money, so she accepts a job as a hostess at a trendy Tokyo nightspot. Here she meets an elderly yakuza, a man with a terrible secret. Grey is no stranger to terrible secrets herself, and she is about to uncover yet another with the help of the inscrutable Dr. Chongming.

By way of warning, this is a disturbing book, and there are scenes of graphic (but in no way gratuitous) violence which are necessary to portray such horrific events. By any measure, The Devil of Nanking is a novel that resonates long after the last page has been turned.

The Less Dead by Denise Mina opens with a personal crisis that explodes into a compelling thriller. Glasgow-based physician Margot Dunlop is facing down the chaos in her life: her adopted mother has recently passed, she’s broken up with her boyfriend, her best friend is being stalked and she has just found out she’s pregnant. Trying to make sense of her world, Margot reaches out to the agency that facilitated her adoption to get in touch with her birth mother, only to learn that she was murdered shortly after Margot’s birth.

From here we descend into the dark underbelly of Glasgow. Margot’s mother was a sex worker and heroin addict, her murder left unsolved by a police force that considered her subhuman. Margot meets her aunt Nikki, also a former sex worker and addict, and learns that her mother’s case was far more complex than a trick gone wrong. Nikki believes that her sister was killed by a corrupt cop, and has received threatening letters that provide details only the killer could know. Margot isn’t sure she wants to be involved in the case, but she isn’t given a choice when the killer begins stalking and harassing her as well.

Mina’s novel stands out in a genre that commodifies the dead bodies of women. Her characters are nuanced, complicated and never stereotypes, and her portrayal of the world of sex work isn’t lurid or voyeuristic. Furthermore, Margot is not the middle-class savior some would mistakenly believe that these women need. And although Margot’s mother was a victim of a violent crime, Mina juxtaposes her murder with the stalking of Margot’s best friend, Lilah, showing that women are the subjected to violence by the men in their life at every socioeconomic level.

As Margot seeks justice for her late mother, she’s introduced to a community of women, some still addicts, some still sex workers, who protect and care for one another, even as they are shamed and shunned by society at large. The Less Dead is at once a gripping thriller and an examination, and vindication, of a group of women who are often faceless, unsympathetic victims.