How strange that two of the most unnerving thriller debuts of the year tackle the same subject: memory loss. Yet aside from this, Before I Go to Sleep (Doubleday £12.99), by British author SJ Watson, and Turn of Mind (Harvill Secker £12.99), by US writer Alice LaPlante, couldn't be more different. In Watson's novel, the story is told by Christine, married to Ben and suffering from a type of amnesia that means her memories are wiped away every time she goes to sleep. She wakes in bed, a middle-aged man beside her, flees from what she thinks is a one-night stand only to be told this man is her husband, that she is not in her 20s but is in fact 47. "In my life there is a then, a before, though before what I cannot say, and there is a now, and there is nothing between the two but a long, silent emptiness that has led me here, to me and him, in this house." Ben leaves for work. Christine discovers a journal she has been keeping: "Don't trust Ben" is emblazoned on the first page. Already optioned for film by Ridley Scott, Before I Go to Sleep is a nerve-jangling journey down the rabbit hole of Christine's mind, towards the deadly secrets waiting at the bottom.
In Turn of Mind, the story is told by Jennifer, 64, a once brilliant hand surgeon who is trekking wearily out into the wastes of Alzheimer's. In contrast to Christine, LaPlante's narrator is not a victim but a suspect: her best friend, Amanda, has been killed and the fingers of her right hand surgically removed. Using, like Watson, the device of a journal to trace the thoughts of her confused narrator, LaPlante has written a harrowing, moving exploration of a mind falling slowly away from the world.
Another chilling debut comes from the Economist's former Moscow correspondent AD Miller. The Booker-shortlisted Snowdrops (Atlantic £7.99) is the confession of English lawyer Nick, his detailing of the time he spent in Moscow and how his obsession with the mysterious Masha leads him to a dark and dangerous place. It's as eloquent on life in Moscow, a city where even in the summer "you could feel the cold germinating in the warmth", as it is on Nick's descent into corruption. In Russia, writes Miller, "there are no business stories. And there are no politics stories. There are no love stories. There are only crime stories." This holds its own with the best of them.
Guilt suffuses the pages of Mississippi author Tom Franklin's Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter (Pan £7.99) as well. It is, at heart, the story of the unlikely childhood friendship between Larry Ott, a lonely white boy, and Silas Jones, the poor black son of a single mother. Now adults, they haven't spoken for years. Silas is the small Mississippi town policeman; Larry has been ostracised ever since a teenage girl vanished after a date with him years ago. Although nothing was proved, when 19-year-old Tina Rutherford disappears, all eyes are on Larry. Franklin's prose is startlingly beautiful, the novel worth reading purely for his evocation of Mississippi, "its odour of rain and worms, dripping trees, the air charged as if lightning had just struck". But what sticks at the end is Franklin's shattering, heart-breaking depiction of loneliness. A deserving winner of the Crime Writers' Association's Gold Dagger for best crime novel of the year.
Altogether less moving, and none the worse for it, is Don Winslow's prequel to Trevanian's classic satire on the spy thriller genre, Shibumi. Winslow's Satori (Headline £6.99) fills in the early life of super-assassin Nicholai Hel, after he is freed from solitary confinement to kill the evil Soviet commissioner to China. Hel is the only man who might be able to do so, thanks to his unprecedented skills in the secret martial art of hoda korosu – the ability to kill using everyday objects. Exhilarating, faintly ridiculous – and as hard to put down as its predecessor.
