SUBURBS in US fiction are often sinister places, but few more so than that at the centre of Sarah Langan’s Good Neighbours (Titan, £8.99).

Maple Street is an aspirational satellite of Long Island, and the Wilde family don’t fit in there and know it. Their accents strike their new neighbours as plebeian, their habits unsettling and their children undisciplined.

But that might not be enough on its own to cause a season of spiralling mayhem if it wasn’t for the sinkhole that opens up in the neighbourhood one dry summer.

A sparkling piece of writing and a fiercely gripping suspense story, this is an original look at the witch hunt, another of US fiction’s perennial themes.

Famous in the German-speaking world, Hansjorg Schneider’s series about Inspector Peter Hunkeler of Basel City CID appears in English for the first time, starting with opening novel The Basel Killings (Bitter Lemon, £8.99).

Basel is an ideal location, being a place where the borders of Switzerland, Germany and France meet in a porous hub. Hunkeler, ageing but resolutely not disillusioned, is in some ways the archetypal “lone inspector” of crime fiction, his habit of drinking in low-class bars only barely tolerated by his bosses because he gets results.

The discovery of an old man dead on a park bench with his ear slit open begins this investigation. The media and the police are quick to lay the blame on foreign criminal gangs but Hunkeler’s determined probing unearths a shameful episode from the nation’s recent history, hidden only by a national act of creative amnesia.

A magnetic central character, a skilful and unhistrionic telling and a dose of political realism make this book a very welcome arrival.

The title of The Final Girl Support Group by Grady Hendrix (Titan, £17.99) refers to that genre of horror films known as slasher movies, in which a homicidal maniac slaughters a group of teens in imaginatively nasty ways.

The final girl is the only one who survives to tell the tale, either by killing the monster or being rescued from him when the police finally show up.

In Hendrix’s horribly entertaining mixture of whodunnit, chase story and feminist satire, some of America’s best-known and real-life final girls meet regularly in a church hall, theoretically for purposes of solidarity, though more often in order to bicker with each other and with their long-standing therapist.

When one of them fails to turn up for the latest session, they’re reminded of the golden rule of slashers: there’s always a sequel.

Martin Edwards returns to his much-loved Lake District Mysteries series with The Crooked Shore (Allison & Busby, £19.99), in which a shocking tragedy forces cold-case expert DCI Hannah Scarlett to reopen a missing-persons file from 20 years earlier.

Back then, a man was charged with murder and acquitted, and Hannah’s new inquiry turns up plenty of crimes —  but not necessarily the ones she was expecting.

A splendidly imaginative plot will keep you guessing and gasping right to the end.