Jess and Pete and their two young children leave London for a new life in a huge, rambling old Suffolk house, but Jess feels uncomfortable and isolated almost from the start. The second novel by the Guardian’s joint head of books, Charlotte Northedge, The People Before (HarperCollins, £14.99) will make us all think twice before planning that move to the country. It was a savage place.” There is something rotten here, but Jude, spiralling into exhaustion and disaster, can’t pinpoint where it is: “Time was no longer a river carrying her forward but a thick sludge.” French always excels at depicting an ordinary life swept away by horror and The Favour is no exception. It was “a place where anything could happen. She meets his girlfriend, gets to know his young son, goes to the house he shared with friends. Jude can’t explain, to the police or even to herself, really, why she agreed to Liam’s request and her life slowly begins to implode as secrets come out and as she digs into who Liam had become.

The police do, though, to let her know his body has been found by the side of a path on Walthamstow Marshes. Can she go and spend Saturday night in a cottage in Norfolk for him? He won’t tell her why, but he “wouldn’t ask her to do anything wrong”. She hasn’t seen him for years, but then he turns up asking her to do him a favour. Husband-and-wife writing team Nicci French’s latest, The Favour (Simon & Schuster, £16.99), follows the fallout when Jude, a doctor, is contacted by her first boyfriend, Liam.

Penny delves into the nature of evil, sensitively exploring the impact of the dreadful events she describes while bringing a warmth and humanity to her disparate cast of characters that, unusually for a crime novel, leaves you feeling better about the world once you’ve finished. It is perfectly possible to pick up the story from here if you haven’t read these novels before, but I would thoroughly recommend giving yourself a treat and starting from the beginning with Still Life. A World of Curiosities(Hodder & Stoughton, £16.99) is the 18th novel in Canadian writer Louise Penny’s Gamache series.

Summary of still life by louise penny