OWEN and Luna met as students at a liberal arts college in the Hudson Valley, New York, in The Accomplice by Lisa Lutz (Titan, £8.99), and despite or because of their obvious incompatibility became instant best friends for life. 

Years later, their relationship puzzles everyone who meets them. They’ve never been lovers; they seem somehow much closer than that. Though they’re both married to other people, their own alliance is clearly still the main one in their lives. 

Is this anyone else’s business? Well, it is if you’re a homicide detective and someone close to Luna and Owen has just died, and you learn that this isn’t the first time that’s happened. 

I don’t expect to read many psychological mysteries this year that are as exquisitely written and compellingly plotted as this one.

Sixty-five years old and still working as a Seoul contract killer, in The Old Woman with the Knife by Gu Byeong-Mo (Canongate, £14.99), Hornclaw constantly wonders how long she’ll be able to continue in the only trade she’s ever known. 

Her memory isn’t as reliable as it was, her body lets her down at inopportune moments, and worst of all she seems to be developing empathy. 

She can only be one error away from spending the rest of her days alone and aimless in her small flat, talking to a dog she doesn’t remember acquiring. And that’s all before she realises that one of her young colleagues is out to get her. 

A book about ageing in a society that doesn’t really have much use for the no longer young, and a curious, unusual crime story; memorable.

Dan Leicester, an Englishman who works for a firm of private detectives in Bologna, returns for his third outing in Requiem in La Rossa by Tom Benjamin (Constable, £9.99). In the world’s oldest university city, the death of a professor of music — apparently murdered by a maniac while leaving the opera — is a serious matter. 

Dan’s agency has been retained to prove the accused’s innocence, but as he pursues clues ever deeper into the competitive and grudge-filled zone where classical music and academia overlap, he discovers layers of corruption and violence sufficient to shock even the case-hardened Bolognese.

La Rossa — so-called for the red brick traditionally used on its buildings, and for its politics — is a fine location for a crime series, and Benjamin does a great job of taking the reader right under the city’s skin. 

An unbearably hip seaside village in Oregon, setting for The Beach House by Beverley Jones (Constable, £9.99), is a long way from the Welsh town of Grace’s childhood, and that’s the whole point. On a new continent, with a new name, she can surely outrun the guilt and horror of her past? Perhaps she can, until the day she comes home to a body on her kitchen floor, lying in a pool of blood.

Tension, twists, humour and heart — this thriller about secrets buried and exhumed has it all.