The Revenge of Rita Marsh by Nilesha Chauvet Faber & Faber, £16.99 Described as a “potent thriller for the post-Me Too age”, British-Indian novelist Nilesha Chauvet’s debut will make readers reassess the fine line between justice and revenge. Rita is the manager of a care home, but by night she turns into someone else entirely.
A self-appointed online vigilante, she entraps men who prey on young girls. All is going to plan until one day an old classmate arrives on the scene, threatening both her identities. Rita must now decide what direction her activities should now take.
Middletide by Sarah Crouch Simon & Schuster, £11.99 A beautiful young doctor is found hanged from a tree in the garden of the novelist Elijah Leith. Leith is viewed by locals as something of an oddity, a prodigal returned after his career has failed.
Initial police investigation points to suicide, but when the circumstances behind the doctor’s death are found to replicate events in one of Leith’s stories, the town assumes he is guilty and things turn darker. He, meanwhile, realises he has been framed. Set in Puget Sound, with its vast stretches of deep estuarine waterways, Middletide is both a psychological thriller and a hymn to this beautiful but unsettling landscape.
The debut novel of the professional American marathon runner Sarah Crouch, it carries echoes of Where the Crawdads Sing in its intense evocation of the wilds. Lucy Foley (Image: free) The Midnight Feast by Lucy Foley HarperColli.