The protagonist of Chris Bridges’s Sick to Death (Avon) is not your run-of-the-mill thriller heroine. Emma is sick with a neurological condition that leaves her crushed by fatigue, prone to blackouts, unable to work. Hers is a disease “without concrete evidence, without affirmative scans or validated cause”, and she is constantly having to justify herself to her family – her mother, cruel stepfather Peter, stepsister and daughter – with whom she shares a tiny council house. “Everyone has their limits of what they can tolerate. It turns out that they couldn’t take me being ill. I can’t stand their lack of care. Why wouldn’t I become angry?” says Emma. When she falls for her handsome neighbour Adam, a doctor, her vague plans to get rid of Peter start to take shape – particularly when she learns more about Adam’s wife, Celeste, and the trouble Adam is in. “My illness doesn’t mean that I have to be relegated to a supporting role, the background character who dies at the end or fades away. I can even be the villain if I want to.” Bridges, who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2020, writes in an author note that he had had enough of the “tired tropes” around sickness in fiction, from the “sickly sweet ill woman”, to the unwell person who is shown to be a fraud. Sick to Death turns these tropes on their head: Emma is a force to be reckoned with, and although the plot does become increasingly tangled, this is deliciously dark and twisted, and a lot of fun.

Fun is also at the heart of CL Pattison’s First to Fall (Headline) – if you’re prepared to suspend your disbelief and just enjoy this tale of murderous figure skaters. We open with a newspaper report about deaths “at the home of legendary German figure skater, Lukas Wolff” during an extreme blizzard. Wolff, we’re told, is famous “for a spectacular sequence of skating moves called ‘the Grim Reaper’”. Our heroine is Libby, a promising but poor young skater who jumps at the chance to go to Wolff’s training camp in the Bavarian forest. Wolff puts Libby and her fellow trainees through their paces, a harsh but brilliant taskmaster, until the blizzard descends, the mobile reception goes, and Libby’s fellow skaters start dying. Pattison is a great writer, Libby a brave and brilliant character, and it turns out that reading about tricky skating moves is more fun than I’d anticipated. Throw in a corker of an escape down an icy river and you’ve got yourself a winner.

TM Logan’s The Daughter (Zaffre) opens with any parent’s nightmare. Lauren arrives to pick up her daughter from university. It’s the longest she’s ever been apart from Evie – 10 weeks – but she was excited for her daughter to venture out into the world, “safe, shallow waters before the open ocean”. But Evie isn’t in the room where Lauren dropped her off; another student lives there. She isn’t answering her phone. No one seems to know who Evie is; everything’s being shut down for Christmas. And then a university official tells Lauren that Evie withdrew from her course more than a month ago. The police, and university, aren’t too worried: not everyone wants their parents to know where they are, and Evie is an adult. But “I know Evie would not have just disappeared from her life. Would not have missed a family Christmas, her little brother’s birthday, a chance to catch up with her friends from home.” So Lauren begins investigating Evie’s disappearance herself. Sometimes an excellent premise like this doesn’t quite deliver when it comes to the payoff. Here, Logan juggles a large number of narrative threads to explain what’s happened to Evie, and just about keeps them in check for an explosively enjoyable finale.

There is another fabulous premise, and another dark female protagonist, in Snæbjörn Arngrímsson’s One True Word (Pushkin Vertigo). I mean, who among us hasn’t felt like abandoning their partner on a deserted island for the night when they’ve been super annoying all day? That’s what plays out in this Icelandic thriller, in which Júlía does exactly that to her husband, Gíó, driving off in a temper in a motor boat to leave him alone in the middle of a freezing fjord in the midst of winter. When she has qualms a little later (“What had I done? What was I thinking?”), she motors back out to rescue him – but Gíó is gone. Júlía delays telling the police about his disappearance, and when she finally does, they don’t take it seriously until his coat is found on a beach. As suspicion builds about her actions, we start to realise there might be more to Júlía (and to Gíó’s disappearance) than she’s telling us. “Bread and water, a hard cot and a view between iron bars, that would be life for the foreseeable future,” she says as she’s questioned by police. “That is, if it’s a crime to temporarily abandon your deceitful husband on a deserted island.” A bestseller in Iceland, One True Word is translated by Larissa Kyzer and is a lovely slice of icy winter chill.

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