With an elegantly brutal opening scene, Jane Casey’s Everything She Didn’t Say (Hemlock, £16.99) launches a cast of characters who play mind games as if they were born to it. This perfectly titled mystery is a surprising and at times darkly comic chess match full of satisfying twists and turns.Something horrible has clearly happened in Shadow House, a high-end “reimagined Irish cottage” on a cliff overlooking the Atlantic. It had most recently been occupied by Maura Ellender and Ruth O’Rourke, but now Maura is missing and Ruth has been found speechless, “covered in someone else’s blood”.Dublin detectives Ben Butler and Liam Farrell have little to go on when they get the case. Despite their urgent need to hear Ruth’s story, it’s hard to argue with her shocked silence under the apparent circumstances. When they do get her talking, solutions somehow always seem to hover just slightly out of reach. With her characteristic balance of character work and tight plotting, O’Casey builds Ben and Liam’s prickly friendship as they keep chasing those elusive answers.Everything She Didn’t Say brings a Hitchcockian flair – think the tone and plotting of Strangers on a Train – to a contemporary Ireland marked by Casey’s eye for dry social observation (one witness “had been waiting her entire life to help the Gardaí and she wasn’t going to miss out on a minute of it”). Everything pops with a skilled glee, making this a novel to remember.A house with a past – several pasts, really – lends a Golden Age flair to Catherine Ryan Howard’s Buyer Beware (Bantam, £20), the best of her recent work. With its perfect twist hiding in plain sight, this clever thriller manages to connect unhappy romantic choices, the fluctuating property market, true crime obsessives and “a human stain” beneath an old dirty carpet, all without missing a beat.One Delaney Row, a small house tucked away just off Dundrum’s Main Street, seems like it offers the ideal location for Ellie to attempt a fresh start, but that start depends on her ability to keep a number of secrets well hidden. Her plan is immediately threatened when someone keeps breaking into her new home. But who is it?Almost as distressingly, the neighbourhood WhatsApp group proves far too curious for her comfort, as does The Murder House Club, a small band of domestic crime-scene enthusiasts with an eye for her house and the “various tragedies” that “have befallen a string of previous owners going all the way back to 1968”. The home where Ellie hoped to hide is, to her dismay, now “a morbid tourist attraction”.Ellie’s chapters alternate with Erin’s story, which begins some years earlier at secondary school in Cork when she meets Jason, then follows her life as it gradually shrinks to suit him. With Howard’s usual wit, Buyer Beware gradually weaves Ellie’s and Erin’s strands together, tapping into something much more resonant than this suburban home’s deceptively nondescript facade would suggest.Set in contemporary South Korea, Minyoung Kang’s Plant Lady (Doubleday, £14.99) is wonderfully surprising, as Kang’s disarmingly discreet prose (well translated by Shanna Tan) lures the reader into a story much less genteel than it first seems. The novel revolves around Yoohee’s boutique plant store, which becomes a destination for local women. Yoohee’s no average florist: she’s more intimate with her plants than with people, and guards them vigilantly. When her first male customer petulantly attacks her favoured palm, she wields her shovel in its defence, with bloody results. Though Kang skips right to Yoohee healing the palm, it’s clear that customer becomes fertiliser for the shop’s garden. He isn’t her last batch of fertiliser: Yoohee soon realises some clients require more help than they know with the men in their lives. As her particular brand of aid becomes a whispered secret among the women who need it most, and men begin disappearing, an ambitious detective grows suspicious. While Plant Lady flirts with cat-and-mouse suspense, the focus remains on Yoohee, a memorable protagonist whose anger at what men do to women is all the sharper for being so closely held. Kang makes Yoohee’s story – told with the driest of wit and a sly psychological build – a terrifically satisfying read, not like anything else this year. In a moment when much crime writing concerns itself with the same rage Yoohee channels, Kang’s slim, spare novel stands out with remarkable clarity. Gary Phillips warmly acknowledges the debt his terrific The Haul (Soho, £25.99) owes to Donald Westlake’s classic Parker novels. Shifting between protagonist O’Conner’s origin story and his later leadership of an epic heist targeting a tech billionaire, this is no dutiful homage. Instead, The Haul delivers savvy old-school thievery and giddily hectic plotting with charm and considerable violence.Stuck in a children’s home after his grandmother died, O’Conner decided that “he wouldn’t be anchored by the past”. Watching neighbourhood bar owner Charlie Mack forced to navigate local gang leaders only made him more driven to leave South Central Los Angeles. Thanks to some good fortune, he does just that.Decades later, O’Conner is a semi-retired elite thief living a quiet suburban life with his partner Gwen. When he’s pitched a big heist by Charlie Mack’s niece, Mavis, O’Conner decides he has one more job in him. With an old pro’s ease, O’Conner assembles a team who harbour few romantic notions about the risks their work requires. Although a civilian, Mavis works alongside them, her skills essential every step of the way. As O’Conner comes to understand, “being black and a woman in tech ... she’d no doubt had to deal with plenty of minefields”.When it comes to storytelling, Phillips is just as much a pro as his protagonist. Here’s hoping we see more of both.A note-perfect noir set in 1943 Mexico, Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s marvellous The Intrigue (Quercus, £22) glitters from the first line to the last while its characters are battered by thwarted dreams, secret shames and overwhelming desires. The Intrigue opens on Ulises, a second-generation grifter reduced to running cons through the lonely hearts correspondence pages of cheap magazines. Dodging one scheme’s fallout in Mexico City, he finds his next target on a fading Veracruz estate. There, fiercely guarding both her much-diminished fortune and her claims on respectability, middle-aged Perla’s running a boarding house (but loan sharking on the side). Her orphaned niece Inés is a vibrant young woman withering in Perla’s clutches, more servant than relative. Inés quickly sees through Ulises and demands they work together: if she helps him seduce and defraud Perla, they’ll split the proceeds. Because everyone here has secrets, nothing goes as smoothly as Inés and Ulises hoped. That’s a classic noir plot – shades of Mildred Pierce, Double Indemnity, The Postman Always Rings Twice – sharpened by a compellingly gothic sense of all the ways that family legacies warp and distort.[ Best new children’s books: From laugh-out-loud ghost stories to football-themed fablesOpens in new window ]Moreno-Garcia’s pacing is delicately controlled, her characters grounded in vivid detail, the story as much a matter of atmosphere as of plot. Ulises and Perla are memorable, but Inés is the real engine, transforming herself and everyone else caught up in this novel’s powerful currents of passion and desperation. A model of what noir can be right now, The Intrigue is simply thrilling.