The noir label has been tenuously attached to all manner of crime fiction of late. But rather than being identified by a landscape (think rural or outback noir), or geography (Nordic noir), or even a setting (domestic noir), the real deal features a hapless character who is always on the outer and for whom things are never going to turn out well.Just Like the Night by Michael Caleb TaskerMichael Caleb Tasker, author of the impressive first novel Just Like the Night (Allen & Unwin, $35), knows this only too well since he has written a PhD thesis exploring the existential roots of noir fiction.Meet 12-year-old Sera sitting in an El Paso hotel room while her father Ray stacks the decks in preparation for an elaborate sting. “There’s a fine line between being a magician and a card sharp,” he tells her. Despite being as sharp as a knife himself, Ray is routinely rumbled and roughed up. As father and daughter drive the length and breadth of the US, eventually decamping to Sydney, Sera wonders “how he made her feel safe while he was still covered in blood”.Fast forward a few decades and Sera is coming to the end of her prison sentence. On her own in a cell, “she’s up early before the sun, face washed, push-ups done and bed made, waiting like there was something to wait for”. To discover what that something might be, Tasker takes us on a round trip to discover what unfolded when Sera and Ray came to Australia, what has happened to them since, and how Sera manages her parole when she discovers that her estranged daughter is being used and abused by the kind of bad man her father never was. Just Like the Night is tightly written, occasionally violent and very noir, especially the haunting conclusion.The Damned by Matt RogersIf violence is not your thing then look away now since The Damned by Matt Rogers (Simon & Schuster, $40) is a veritable bloodbath. While initially a tad hesitant, after reading this sentence “Quadriceps flare beneath faded gym shorts as he balances two hundred and forty pounds of authentic Japanese straw on one shoulder”, I was in. Logan Booth (he of the flaring quadriceps) is a contract killer of Reacheresque proportions and this is his third outing.Unlike Lee Child’s Reacher, Booth has an offsider, a diminutive, gay, recovering meth addict, whose love and loyalty to Logan ensure we know from the start the latter is a “good guy” despite his propensity to off people at an alarming rate. The fact that the president of the United States wants Logan dead is another tick in his favour. This time, the flaring quadriceps are headed to Colombia to rescue a former lover before Logan finds himself up against a nasty cartel determined to take him out.The violence inflicted on both sides is surprisingly inventive and beautifully choreographed once you get over the gore factor and the prose style. This is the kind of propulsive crime that might make you burn the soup. I did.The Burn by Jessica Mansour-NahraJessica Mansour-Nahra’s The Burn (Hachette, $25) is of a different order of flammable magnitude. Set in 2030, it imagines an Australia emerging from a five-month lockdown caused by rampant wildfires on a national scale. It’s a timely scenario given the disasters affecting Europe during their summer and dire warnings of worse to come.After months of enforced isolation writing uplifting social media posts for her university employer’s website, Carmen is suspiciously reluctant to leave her featureless apartment and a dying pothos plant. But her three former high school chums have different plans: a camping trip on the idyllic south-east coast that has so far escaped the fires. What could possibly go wrong?Lots apparently, but there will also be time for Carmen to ruminate on her chequered sexual history and “her broken, disparate family”. This includes her Finnish scientist father who has remarried and is deeply concerned about the fate of the walrus, her distant scientist mother somewhere in the Indian Ocean with her new German husband, and her horse-loving older sister Anna with whom she has always had a taut and tricky relationship. There’s a lot to work through.While Burn is labelled as a psychological thriller, and it is indeed that, there are also telling reflections on the power of social media for good and evil. As it emerges, it’s not just bushfires we have to worry about.Every Time She Wakes by Petronella McGovernNevertheless, bushfires also figure in Petronella McGovern’s latest suburban thriller, Every Time She Wakes (Allen & Unwin, $35). University careers counsellor, Suzanne Vitale, is sleepless and fretting at 2.30am when the Rural Fire Service arrives to evacuate her and her family ahead of the firestorm. Bundled into a van, it’s not long before Suzanne suspects they are being abducted rather than rescued begging the question: why? There’s scant time to consider the options as the van crashes and Suzanne wakes up.Although it might be assumed that it was all a bad dream, McGovern is playing trickier plot games. While there’s a clue in the fact that Suzanne’s eldest daughter Frankie is studying a unit on “Metaphysics, Reality, Time and Possibility”, it might be more helpful to think Groundhog Day meets Sliding Doors.Like most domestic protagonists, Suzanne’s got a lot to figure out about her life and work. This includes how best to handle student complaints concerning a repulsive radio shock jock named Rowdy Mac who has made a bankable career demeaning women. Bells ringing anyone? Rowdy’s been hiring Suzanne’s students as interns, before he moves on to Suzanne’s daughter and her best friend who is a social media influencer. This is another book with something to say about the contemporary media landscape.Given that Suzanne has to relive the bushfire scenario again and again until she gets it right, it’s tricky to summarise a plot that effectively works backwards rather than forwards. Thankfully it all makes sense in the end although you may be left wondering just how she did it. McGovern, that is.You Know What You Did by K.T. NguyenAmerican author K.T. Nguyen is also playing inventive mind games in her psychological thriller You Know What You Did (No Exit Press, $33) which is heavy on the psychology and light on the thrills. Annie Shaw is a budding artist with a teenage daughter, an entitled war-reporter husband and a Vietnamese mother hoarding all manner of detritus in the carriage house of their large estate. Annie also suffers from punishing bouts of a disgust-driven obsessive-compulsive disorder that is painfully realised. She takes a lot of very hot showers.Nguyen incrementally replays the trauma experienced by Annie and her mother to explain their present plight. Although they have stuck together through war and displacement, their relationship has always been fraught since her mother has demeaned Annie’s every move. Sadly, Annie is unwittingly repeating this demeaning with her own teenage daughter, Tabby. How this maternal cycle might be broken is the major work of this book.You Know What You Did has been well received in the US, winning an Agatha and Anthony Award for Best First, although I found it a rather solemn trudge. In its favour, it is illuminating on the experience of forced migration and the debilitating effects of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). I just wish it had been shorter and sharper. More noir even.The Booklist is a weekly newsletter for book lovers from Jason Steger. Get it delivered every Friday.