A STILL admired US crime novel of the 1960s, Hard Rain Falling by Don Carpenter (Penguin Classics, £10.99), tracks the fortunes of a group of lost boys from the 1940s to the 1960s, from teenage hustling in the pool halls of Oregon, through to brave but mostly doomed attempts to become adults. 

Along the way there are violent crimes, brutal prison sentences and lives which are anything but unexamined: why am I like this, the characters ask themselves. Did life just happen to me, or did I shape it? To look for meaning and change — is that an aspiration, or a delusion?

Often described as noir fiction, Carpenter's debut is crucially free of the revelling in despair and pointlessness that usually characterises that style. If the central question posed by this compelling book is whether it’s worth trying to get up when the world keeps knocking you down, the answer given is a battered but unbreakable yes.

Eloise lives a blissfully uneventful life in a small town in Cornwall, in The Vanishing Act by Jo Jakeman (Constable, £20). She runs an art gallery, does yoga with her friends, spends evenings with her faithful husband, and only worries about change — such as her children going away to university. 

The time bomb that detonates this tranquillity comes in the form of a corpse discovered nearby, and identified as that of a teenager who disappeared 30 years ago. But Eloise knows the body can’t be Elizabeth King — because she is Elizabeth King.

As well as a good mystery, Jakeman writes warm and funny dialogue that brings the relationships between the characters thoroughly to life.

Only a writer with Martin Edwards’s knowledge of and feeling for British crime fiction in all its breadth and depth could have pulled off Miss Winter In The Library With A Knife (Head of Zeus, £16.99), such is its subtlety and ambition. Not that you need to be a student of the genre to find it highly enjoyable; it’s just that if you are, you’ll get an extra layer to your cake.

Otherwise, simply dig in to a feast of cunning clues and misdirections, as a group of life’s losers are invited to play a Christmas murder game with a prize that could put their lives back on track. Naturally, when the snow sets in they are isolated from the world and at the mercy of a killer who isn’t just playing, in this classic whodunnit with a contemporary setting.

When it comes to snow, however, Harry Whitehead’s new ecothriller, White Road (Claret Press, £12.97), has them all licked. A giant blow-out at a dodgy oilrig in the Canadian Arctic leaves one unprepared rescue worker struggling to rescue herself from a land of polar bears, shifting icebergs and hallucinations. Capitalism is melting as well as the ice, and both get more dangerous as they die.

This is a spellbinding adventure story, told with anger, wit and a sense of beauty.