The Wolf Gift by Anne Rice (Chatto & Windus, £18.99)
Reuben Golding, a young, handsome and privileged reporter on the San Francisco Observer, is sent on a routine assignment to write about a mansion on the Californian coast. While there he's attacked and bitten by a mysterious creature  and undergoes a terrible transformation while hospitalised. So far, so routine, but what makes this novel special is the changes the author rings on the werewolf theme: her creation is no slavering, conscienceless beast. Reuben's transformation confers the desire to use his powers to do good, and his superhero actions on behalf of crime victims soon alert the media and authorities. This allows Rice to spin both a convincing thriller and an inquisition on the nature of good and evil  a recurring theme in her work  as Reuben avoids his pursuers and considers the creature he has become. Superb.

Age of Aztec by James Lovegrove (Solaris, £7.99)
In an alternative timeline the Conquistadors were defeated by the Aztec nation, which went on to spread its bloodthirsty empire across the globe. Britain was one of the last countries to fall and one man, the Conquistador, is fighting the Aztec rule with a series of attacks on the priesthood. The man behind the mask is Stuart Reston, driven to murder by the voluntary sacrifice of his neurotic wife and their young son. What starts as a routine revenge cum police-procedural drama, as feisty officer Mal Vaughn vows to capture the Conquistador, soon escalates into a full-blown thriller as Reston flees Britain for South America and the heart of the Aztec nation, where he takes his fight to the gods. Higher on action and violence than Lovegrove's previous books, the novel still manages to portray convincingly the psychology of its two antiheroes and paint a vivid picture of Aztec lore.

The Return Man by VM Zito (Hodder and Stoughton, £11.99)
The novel opens four years after the "zombie apocalypse", with the US divided into the western Evacuated States, populated by the living dead, and Safe States of the East, a haven for survivors. Henry Marco is a cynical bounty-hunter who travels the Evacuated States on a hair-raising quest to put to rest  that is, kill  the dead loved ones of grieving relatives in the east. It's a neat twist on the theme, given added poignancy because Marco himself is searching for his zombie wife. When he is hired by the eastern government to kill an old acquaintance, his job becomes a lot more difficult; there are not only marauding zombies to contend with, but the ruthless local Chinese mafia. Zito expertly piles on thrills, cliffhangers and numerous twists, investing renewed life into the shambling, cliché-ridden corpse of the zombie subgenre.

Pure by Julianna Baggott (Headline, £14.99)
After a nuclear holocaust, the world is divided into the Pure and the Wretches. The former are the survivors, who live relatively safe, sanitised lives within a vast dome, while the latter exist in appalling hardship in a contaminated wasteland beyond the dome. Worse, the Wretches are fused to whatever objects were in their proximity at the moment of the atomic blast: protagonist Pressia Belze's right hand, for instance, is melded with a doll's head. It's a concept which jars at first, but then becomes a constant and poignant reminder of a world irretrievably lost. The narrative shifts between those inside the dome and those outside, as the two worlds inevitably come together. Baggott tells what might have been an overly grim tale with crystalline precision, offering a hint of hope in the novels to follow.

Eric Brown's The Kings of Eternity is published by Solaris.