The serial killer is one of crime fiction’s most enduring archetypes, and with good reason. Written well, and centring on a killer for whom murder seems to be its own motive, the serial killer is fiction’s most chilling antagonist. It’s also the most overdone of the subgenres, of course, and prone to cliches. Joanna Wallace’s novels, the latest of which is The Art of Getting Hammered (Viper, £18), are a breath of fresh air. Claire, who casually describes herself as “a part-time serial killer”, is an artist by vocation and a killer by compulsion. Ever since her murderous excess in The Dead Friend Project (2024), however, Claire seems to have lost her mojo: “This day has been a total write-off so far. I haven’t painted anyone. Haven’t killed anyone.”Happily (for Claire, at least), a new job working behind the bar at the Red Lion pub offers our anti-heroine plenty of opportunities to reconnect with her inner sociopath, and soon she’s back in action and wielding her beloved hammer again. Narrated in the first person, which gives us access to Claire’s constant stream of frustrations, snark and blackly comic observations about “the world of the ordinary”, The Art of Getting Hammered is a breezy romp that embraces Dexter and a vigilante brand of feminism that eschews the serial killer story’s usual gore and psychosexual machinations to deliver an upbeat tale of entirely justified retribution. K T Nguyen’s debut You Know What You Did (No Exit Press, £9.99) is a slow-burning psychological thriller that opens with Annie Shaw, an artist, grieving the death of her overbearing mother, Mẹ, who came to the US as a refugee fleeing the Vietnam War. Already distraught, and sinking into the obsessive-compulsive behaviour that has plagued her since childhood, Annie’s life is thrown into turmoil when she is accused of murdering her patron, the local eccentric and art-lover Byrdie Fenton. What follows is a slow-motion nervous breakdown, a fever-dream of guilt and erratic decision-making that renders Annie an unreliable narrator, and perhaps even an impulsive killer: “The idea that she might have willed these horrors into existence sickens her.” Not all of the plot-twists ring true here, but where Nguyen really excels is her ability – as Annie fights the same battles with her teenage daughter Tabitha that she herself once fought with Mẹ – to flesh out “the generational trauma in immigrant families”.Robert J Harris’s Crescendo (Polygon, £9.99) opens in Hollywood in 1959 with author Robert Burgoyne summoned by Alfred Hitchcock to write the script for the maestro’s follow-up to North by Northwest. But when the production is beset by a series of incidents, Hitchcock suspects sabotage and swiftly commissions Burgoyne, who pens trashy hard-boiled thrillers under the nom-de-plume Jack Latimer, to take on a gumshoe role and investigate. [ New crime fiction: frenemies, foul play and a touch of the supernaturalOpens in new window ]The novel is littered with fascinating nuggets of information about the real-life Hitchcock, and the director did begin and abandon a film shortly after completing North by Northwest, and Harris does a fine job of recreating the sordid glamour of life on a Hollywood set. The idea that Hitchcock might entrust an unknown screenwriter with a private eye gig takes a bit of swallowing, of course, and it’s something of a shame that it’s Burgoyne / Latimer, and not Harris himself, who is a keen student of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. That said, if you’re happy to run with the unlikely premise, Crescendo is an enjoyably whimsical slice of Old Hollywood fantasy. Thao Thai’s The Seekers of Deer Creek (Quercus, £22) centres on the warring sisters Vivi and Calla, daughters of Vietnamese immigrants who were raised in Wisconsin and grew up to love art, Calla as an artist and Vivi as a conservator. When their abusive, alcoholic father dies, the sisters make a surprise find among his papers: a sketch of the Vietnamese-French surrealist painter K P Lý’s famous Blue Mirror that appears – to Vivi’s expert eye – to be the work of Lý himself. But how did their father, a blue-collar worker, get his hands on a Lý sketch? And why is the sketch so different in crucial ways to the finished Blue Mirror? What follows is a work of art scholarship in fictional form as Vivi and Calla travel to Arles in the south of France, and then to Vietnam, unearthing clues about the sketch, the Blue Mirror and the reclusive Lý as they go, a search that gradually expands to encompass their own family history and that of Vietnam in the second half of the 20th century. Thai is especially vivid when bringing the fictional Lý’s artwork to life, but The Seekers of Deer Creek is at its best when she’s writing about broken families, sisterhood and the ties that bind. Akane Araki’s Murder at the End of the World (Pushkin Vertigo, £14.99), translated by Jesse Kirkwood, is a hugely ambitious debut. Set in the tourist town of Dazaifu in Japan, it opens in spectacular style as the 23-year-old Haru, out for a driving lesson, drives into a grove where multiple people have hanged themselves. “The last bestseller in the world had been a suicide manual,” Haru tells us; some months previously, the news broke that a planet-killing asteroid was on a direct collision course with Earth and due to impact Japan “with a kinetic energy equal to 45 billion megatons of TNT”. So when Haru and her driving instructor Isagawa, a former cop, discover a murdered man in the boot of a parked car, they know there’s no point in investigating, because there simply isn’t time for justice to be served. And yet they summon the necessary will: “Listen, asteroid or no asteroid, the world’s a pretty meaningless place. We all know we’re going to die eventually, and yet we can’t help but carry on going about our meaningless lives.” It’s the kind of concept Beckett might have conceived of for a crime novel, and there’s no doubt that Araki’s tongue is firmly wedged in her cheek as the plot unfolds to reveal that a serial killer is at play in the deserted streets of Dazaifu. That said, Araki is deeply sincere about the relationship that develops between Haru and Isagawa as they pursue their investigation, doing whatever it takes to dredge meaning from a world on the brink of immolation. Declan Burke’s latest novel is The Lammisters (No Alibis Press)