Luther: The Calling, by Neil Cross (Simon & Schuster, £14.99)

Cross has been producing unsettling, lyrical thrillers for over a decade, but has so far found more success writing for TV. (He did a stint as lead writer for Spooks.) This is a novelisation of Luther, the drama he devised and wrote for the BBC, and is the first in a projected series of stand-alone novels featuring agonised DCI John Luther, "a big man with a big walk". A prequel, it shows us how Luther came to be so agonised by taking readers further into Mo Hayder territory than I for one wanted to go. Cross has always dealt in darkness and been so adept at conjuring bogeymen from the catacombs of mythology that you start to see them everywhere. The key murders in The Calling are so repulsive and their perpetrator so plausible that at times I had to force myself to keep reading. But I'm glad I did.

The Secrets Between Us, by Louise Douglas (Bantam, £12.99)

If you'd never read Rebecca or any of the sub-Nicci French supermarket stalkathons that use it as a template then you might be tempted by Douglas's third novel, perhaps because its title sounds familiar. (Maggie O'Farrell's superior The Distance Between Us was published in 2004.) The twisty plot has fragile, newly single Sarah meeting brooding Alex on holiday. He radiates incipient violence, but his wife has disappeared and is presumed dead, so Sarah is free to move into his house in the small village of Burrington Stoke. The relationship between Sarah and Jamie is deftly sketched, and the polite, measured prose is up to scratch. But this whole genre has become so introverted. Can't someone shake it up a bit?

Spartan, by Matthew Dunn (Swordfish, £12.99)

The mere fact that you were once a spy does not qualify you to write espionage thrillers. Dunn spent five years as a field operative in MI6, so we must assume the tradecraft in his debut novel is authentic. But really, Jack Reacher with two broken legs beating 15 men to a pulp feels more authentic than anything in Spartan, in which "super-spy" Will Cochrane is one of the most blankly generic heroes in modern thrillerdom, not to mention the most freakishly indestructible: shot three times in the stomach at close range, Cochrane is back at work within days. Dunn's writing is rigid with cliché  characters are constantly frowning and nodding slowly and not meeting each other's eyes  while the dialogue oscillates between portentous ("Do whatever you have to do. But you must succeed") and boringly expositional. Avoid.

Burned, by Thomas Enger, translated by Charlotte Barslund (Faber, £12.99)

This debut from Norwegian journalist and composer Enger has real strengths: the careful language, preserved in the fine translation; and its haunted journalist hero who is returning to work after a domestic fire which claimed his son. Henning Juul's grief isolates but also sensitises him. Asked to follow the unfolding case of a young woman who has been found stoned to death in a tent, he quickly becomes suspicious of the official line  that it's a Sharia revenge killing. If the cynicism of modern news media is well conveyed, Enger's plotting is scattershot, and the chapters told from the point of view of the lascivious DI Brogeland aren't as funny as we're obviously supposed to find them. Still, this could be an intriguing series.

John O'Connell's novel The Baskerville Legacy will be published by Short Books on 1 September.