Four women work at the Danish Centre for Genocide Information in Copenhagen, and two of them (best friends Iben and Malene) receive anonymous e-mailed death threats. Adroitly rotating the quartet as narrators, Christian Jungersen’s The Exception (Weidenfeld £12.99), translated by Anna Paterson, shows these experts in hatred becoming infected by it as they try to identify the sender. Tensions at work lead Iben to suspect the centre’s librarian, but the boss’s PA is also in the frame due to links with a Serbian war criminal. Because its theme is office politics, this original and brilliantly constructed thriller will appeal to readers who normally steer clear of murder mysteries.

Like Jungersen, the Norwegian Jo Nesbo has benefited from publishers’ post-Henning Mankell eagerness to sign up Scandinavian crime writers. And Nesbo’s well-crafted The Redbreast (Harvill £11.99), translated by Don Bartlett, resembles the Swede’s work in featuring a brilliant but infuriatingly wayward veteran detective, Harry Hole, who’s in the doghouse after a rather nasty blunder. It departs from the model, though, in switching between present-day Oslo and the eastern front in 1942, when some Norwegians fought alongside Germans: the relevance of this subplot becomes clear once Hole links neo-Nazis to a string of recent shootings.

With Kurt Wallender-like stubbornness, meanwhile, Mankell himself continues to frustrate his editors throughout Europe by declining to deliver novels that involve his glum gumshoe and take place in modern Sweden. His new offering meets neither requirement. Set during 1914-16, Depths (Harvill £16.99), translated by Laurie Thompson, is the story of Lars Tobiasson-Svartman, a naval engineer, who takes a break one day from looking for a channel for warships by rowing to a bleak, apparently deserted island; there he finds Sara Fredrika, a widow close to madness and starvation. Strangely obsessed by her, Tobiasson-Svartman starts to lead a deranged double life in which he lies to Sara Fredrika, his wife and his superiors in Stockholm — a tissue of falsehoods that forces him into criminality. Oddly paced and (like The Redbreast) much longer than it needs to be, Depths is a baffling fable that reads like a throwback to early-20th-century German fiction, in which enigmatic antiheroes were similarly driven by unfathomable compulsions.

As in Depths, crime in Trails to Heaven (Hale £18.99) is only a light coating on a novel with other preoccupations. The hero of Stuart Wavell’s debut is Jack Walker, a wildlife officer on Baffin Island, in Canada’s Arctic archipelago. When a Viking weapon turns up, he alerts an academic pal in Oxford and the idea of Norsemen in North America excites the media. The discovery also leads, however, to arguments with a pig-headed Swedish businessman and unwise local excitement over the prospect of a tourism bonanza. Wooing and wildlife scenes, scholars’ squabbles and macho clashes on the ice are ably blended; but the book’s most memorable aspect is its vivid portrayal of the threatened ways of the Inuit, from shamanic healing to ancestral hunting methods.

Also a debut, Gillian Flynn’s Sharp Objects (Weidenfeld £10) is narrated by Camille Preaker, a crime reporter in Chicago. Sent back to her home town in Missouri when two girls are murdered there, she stays uncomfortably in the mansion where she grew up, with her snobbish and controlling mother, vacuous stepfather and minxy, volatile half-sister, 13 going on 30. Using investigative techniques that are unlikely to improve the image of journalists, she beds not just the cop handling the case but also his teenage prime suspect. Although not wholly convincing as a whodunnit, it is a stunningly accomplished evocation of the oppressiveness of small-town life and is just as assured in depicting the gradually revealed psychological disorder that links Camille to both killer and victims.

Alan Furst’s The Foreign Correspondent (Weidenfeld £12.99) is largely set in late-1930s Paris, where Carlo Weisz combines reporting for Reuters with editing an anti-Mussolini paper. When not dodging Il Duce’s assassins or dining with French and British spies, he tries to get his girlfriend out of Berlin before war makes it impossible. Furst’s Simenon-like evocations of mid- century Paris are a reliable delight; what is also impressive here is how a relatively slender novel gives a panoramic picture of fascism and its opponents elsewhere in Europe, as Weisz’s job takes him to Spain, Germany, Italy and Czechoslovakia.

David Baldacci’s The Collectors (Macmillan £17.99), his follow-up to The Camel Club, at first appears to be two novels awkwardly spliced together. One is set in Washington, DC, and sees the club members investigating a series of killings because the victims include their librarian friend Jonathan. The other centres on Annabelle, a con artist, and her scam to rob villainous casino-owner Jerry Bagger of $33m. The story lines converge, however, because she turns out to be Jonathan’s ex-wife, and helps the club boys to hunt the Washington killer, while Bagger vows to destroy her. Although as expertly plotted as all Baldacci’s work (the details of the scam are especially riveting), The Collectors is likely to leave readers feeling cheated: led to expect an ending in which Bagger tracks Annabelle down, you find the denouement of his revenge scheme postponed to the next novel.

Under Orders (M Joseph £18.99) is Dick Francis’s first appearance for six years, but the old boy returns to the saddle with no obvious signs of rustiness. At the Cheltenham festival, one-armed sleuth Sid Halley stumbles, as you do, on the body of a murdered jockey. It’s widely assumed he was shot by an irascible trainer, either for fixing races or for failing to. But Halley pursues other theories, while also investigating why an owner’s horses keep losing. Full of entertainingly dodgy minor characters, this is the familiar Francis formula, but with two interesting departures. Change in the author’s normally timeless racing world is acknowledged by assigning a key role to internet gambling, and there is a highly bizarre finale in which the hero is attacked with his own artificial arm.

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