Linwood Barclay, Michael Collins, Jo Nesbø

Linwood Barclay, a former columnist for the Toronto Star, is the internationally bestselling author of seven critically acclaimed novels, including Fear the Worst, Too Close to Home, and No Time for Goodbye, which has been optioned for film. Touted as “Canada’s current thriller king” by the National Post, Barclay presents his latest work, Never Look Away, about a husband whose wife disappears, along with everything he thought he knew about their life together.

Michael Collins’ (Ireland/USA) work has garnered numerous awards, including a Pushcart Award for Best American Short Stories and Kerry Ingredients Irish Novel of the Year, and has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. His work has been twice selected for inclusion in the New York Times Notable Books of the Year. He lives in the US, although he keeps very close ties with Ireland and travels widely. Collins presents Midnight in a Perfect Life, in which a writer’s journey towards fatherhood throws up shadows from his past.

Jo Nesbø is a musician, songwriter, economist and author. His first crime novel featuring Harry Hole was published in Norway in 1997 and was an instant hit, winning the Glass Key Award for best Nordic crime novel – an accolade shared with Peter Høeg, Henning Mankell and Karin Fossum. The Snowman, the fifth of Nesbø's novels to be translated into English, follows Inspector Harry Hole on his latest case – a killer who drives him to the brink of insanity. The Snowman is translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett.

Karl is a troubled writer standing on the precipice of 40. After a degree of success in his early career he is now battling with what he terms his “opus”, his legacy to the world. But his partner Lori, the main breadwinner, is also thinking about her destiny and wants a child. As they embark on fertility treatment, Karl is forced to confront his deepest fear – that he will turn out to be like his father, a travelling salesman who was found dead after apparently committing murder when Karl was just 13.

David Harwood, a reporter in Promise Falls, New York, is stressed out. The newspaper he works for is outsourcing jobs to India, he can’t get a solid lead on the corrupt for-profit prison moving to town, and his wife, Jan, is struggling with a bout of depression. As a much-needed break, David and Jan decide to take their four-year-old son, Ethan, to a local amusement park for the day. But revelry is quickly replaced by panic when, within an hour of arriving at the park, Ethan goes missing. Though he is soon found, panic escalates to full-blown terror when Jan suddenly disappears. Confused and worried, David finds himself desperately searching for any clue that could lead him to his wife – even if it means unraveling a tangle of lies and deception that become more complicated at every turn.

On the night of the season’s first snow fall, a young boy wakes to find his mother gone. He walks through the silent house, only finding wet footprints on the stairs. In the garden looms a solitary figure: a snowman with his mother’s pink scarf around its neck. Inspector Harry Hole is convinced there is a link between the disappearance and a menacing letter he received some months earlier. As Harry and his team delve into unsolved case files, they discover that an alarming number of wives and mothers have gone missing over the years. When a second woman disappears Harry’s suspicions are confirmed and for the first time in his career he finds himself confronted with a serial killer operating on his turf.