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Atlantic Crime, 288 pages, $43.50

A mother and her brilliant but socially awkward adult son must work together to dispose of a body. A young man on the autism spectrum tries to figure out how to fulfil his promise to have a doll buried with his dead mother 鈥� after she has already been interred. A struggling musician gets a star-making opportunity, if only she can figure out a way to raise enough cash to get herself and her guitar to Nashville.

These three storylines collide in surprising ways in Ken Jaworowski鈥檚 sophomore novel. The three main characters, each of whom narrates alternating sections, struggle with mighty challenges. And each displays resilience and resourcefulness that belies their status as working-class denizens of a small Pennsylvania rust belt town.

Jaworowski is a master at handling multiple plots simultaneously, intersecting them at key points. But as the reader approaches the end of this exhilarating novel, the author pulls off his biggest bait and switch: it was never a plot novel at all, but a character novel. It鈥檚 the three protagonists who keep us grounded and turning the pages, anxious about their decisions and pulling for their success. This is an emotionally powerful examination of what happens when very bad circumstances afflict essentially good people.

One Dark Night

Hannah Richell

Simon & Schuster Canada, 384 pages, $24.95

Members of a tony British boarding school attend a Halloween party in a woodland supposedly haunted by the ghost of a young woman in white. Before dawn of the next day, one of the students is dead, and the police investigation seems increasingly focused on Ellie, who lied to her parents and snuck out to the party. To make matters worse, her separated mom and dad are, respectively, the school鈥檚 chief of student welfare and one of the detectives assigned to the murder.

U.K. novelist Hannah Richell paints a scenario dripping with dread and Gothic trappings, including the ghostly apparition of Sally in the Wood and the way the corpse was discovered, weirdly posed and with the words 鈥減unish, destroy, repent鈥� scrawled on it. The plot involves numerous turns and dead ends, including threatening texts Ellie receives from an anonymous email account mimicking the ghostly girl and rumours of a shadowy figure in the woods spying on the teens.

Richell brings all the story strands together in a satisfyingly tense climax that features multiple reversals. 鈥淥ne Dark Night鈥� is a creepily atmospheric read perfect for the shorter days and cooler temperatures of the fall.

Son

Johana Gustawsson and Thomas Enger

Orenda, 338 pages, $35.99

Also set during an ill-fated Halloween party, this new collaboration from two masters of Scandinavian noir is a taut and briskly paced procedural focusing on the vicious killings of two teens. Seven years ago, Kari Voss, an expert in body language and false memory, had her life upended when her 10-year-old son was kidnapped. Voss paid the ransom, but her son was not returned and remains missing.

In the present, Voss, still traumatized, is called in to consult when a local boy named Jesper is arrested for the murders of two 17-year-old girls found in a house in the titular town outside Oslo, tied to chairs with their throats cut. All the evidence points to Jesper, but Voss isn鈥檛 convinced and attempts to prove the young man鈥檚 innocence.

This novel 鈥� the first in a projected series 鈥� is as interesting for how it was composed as for anything else. It was co-written by Gustawsson in Sweden writing in French, and Enger in Oslo writing in Norwegian; Enger then retranslated the entire thing into English. It鈥檚 remarkable that the finished product reads as smoothly as it does, though the choice to feature Voss in both first- and third-person perspective is a bit too convenient. Details about the intricacies of body language 鈥� a person sightless from birth will cover their eyes if frightened 鈥� are neatly integrated into a story that provides a suitable jumping off point for further instalments.

What the Night Brings

Mark Billingham

Sphere, 400 pages, $26.99

After a hiatus to introduce a new series centred on a detective named Declan Miller, Mark Billingham returns with the 19th instalment of his acclaimed Tom Thorne聽series. 鈥淲hat the Night Brings鈥� opens with a flourish: four cops attending the arrest of a serial killer are poisoned by spiked doughnuts. Three of them die, one ends up in a coma. As Thorne begins to investigate 鈥� alongside series regulars Nicola Tanner, Dave Holland and DCI Russell Brigstocke 鈥� it becomes apparent that the culprit has a beef against the cops, and is just getting started.

After 18 turns with Thorne, it seems that Billingham needed to do something spectacular to keep readers 鈥� and, perhaps, himself 鈥� interested. As its title suggests, 鈥淲hat the Night Brings鈥� is a surpassingly dark novel, addressing issues of police corruption and sex crimes that may make readers squirm. It also contains two eye-popping reveals in the climax, both of which may prove more startling to readers of the earlier Thorne books rather than those coming fresh to the series.

Following two books with the lighter, more humorous Miller, Billingham has made a welcome return to the grittier Thorne novels. This new one, if not the best in the series, is consistently readable, though it does make one wonder where the author might take his most famous character from here.