LARA THOMPSON’S One Night, New York (Virago, £14.99) begins on a winter night in 1932. Two women wait at the top of the Empire State Building to see whether their plan to take an awful revenge on a powerful man, guilty of unforgivable crimes against them, will work.

And they’re waiting, too, to see whether either of them will be able to bring themselves to carry it out.  

From the Dust Bowl of the Great Depression to a New York changing forever as the tenement-dwellers are forced to make way for the skyscrapers, this is an elegantly written debut.

It’s a novel about gangsters and their pet politicians, of Greenwich Village artists and nightclub musicians, of corruption and violence — a wonderful recreation of an era that’s both scintillating and horrifying.

Ellie’s mum is remarrying in The Girl Who… by Andreina Cordani (Atom, £7.99), so Ellie has a new home and a new stepsister.

The home is a rambling, musty old bookshop with primitive plumbing arrangements. But the stepsister is even worse.

She’s the famous Leah who, 10 years ago, saw her mother and sister murdered and has since become a secular prophet of forgiveness and non-violence.

To Ellie’s guilty fury, the household revolves around Leah and the rules designed to cushion her from any harm or upset. But Ellie begins to realise that her new sister is not quite the saint she appears. She has secrets. And she has plans.

It’s another debut, aimed primarily at a teenage audience, in which sparky writing effortlessly carries a gripping story and a subtle moral.

Northumbrian murder cop DCI Kate Daniels, is a long way from her home patch in Without a Trace by Mari Hannah (Orion, £7.99).

A plane has vanished during a flight from London to New York and Kate is unconcerned about jurisdiction or protocol. Her girlfriend was due to board that flight and until Kate knows for sure what happened to her partner, she’s on the case whether her bosses like it or not.

What starts out as a hunt for terrorist agents at Heathrow soon turns into a combination of conspiracy thriller and police procedural, peppered with juicy twists.

In Jane Harper’s The Survivors (Little Brown, £12.99), Kieran and his girlfriend return to their coastal village hometown in Tasmania to help his mother pack up her house in preparation for his father’s move to a nursing home.

Kieran’s memories of the old place are dominated by a terrible event from his teenage years which he has always blamed himself for.

There are plenty of locals who hate, despise or pity him — and that’s before a killing takes place.

This is only Harper’s fourth book but she is already becoming one of the biggest draws in crime fiction.

Her mastery of slowly revealed secrets, of the past echoing in the future, is unsurpassed.

So too is her ability to create small communities, through both their social and physical elements.