TWO US college friends undertake a trip by canoe through the beautiful, dangerous wilderness of northern Canada in The River by Peter Heller (Weidenfeld, £14.99).

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That perhaps would be fine if all they were facing was the wilderness and not the two other pairs of travellers they meet along the way.

Beautifully written, in the intense but undemonstrative tradition of North American wilderness writing, this is an exciting adventure along with a happy and sad story of young friendship.

Joe Country by Mick Herron (John Murray, £14.99) is the sixth in the series featuring Slough House, where MI5 redeploys its incompetent, disturbed or disgraced agents. They’re harmlessly occupied with pointless make-work — at least, that's the theory.

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Widely hailed as the finest sequence in spy fiction since le Carre, these novels feature hilariously funny characters, around which are built inventive espionage plots. Like many of the most skilled humorists, Herron uses his jokes surgically to reveal and examine relationships and emotions.

Since his mother died, young Jake has acquired a reputation for talking to imaginary friends, in The Whisper Man by Alex North (Michael Joseph, £12.99).

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But, in this same village 15 years ago, a man abducted and killed several young boys. The press called him “the whisper man” and Jake’s invisible companions seem to know a lot about him.

This exceptionally creepy thriller is also a touching portrait of a bereaved father and son learning to depend on each other.

In The Killer You Know by SR Masters (Sphere, £8.99), four friends gather for a Christmas reunion near the dull, isolated West Midlands village where they grew up.

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Will had declared that his aim was to murder precisely three strangers, so that he could qualify as an official serial killer. They’d all laughed back then but now, as the mysteries and coincidences pile up, it doesn’t seem funny at all.

Masters’s debut is a twisty, irresistible suspenser about the perils of nostalgia and the dangers of leadership.