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Harbour Publishing, 324 pages, $24.95

Vancouver’s Wiebe has made a name for himself with the Dave Wakeland series of hard-boiled crime thrillers; he is one of those fabulously rare literary figures who actually gets better with each successive book. Case in point, his newest, a stand-alone thriller called “Ocean Drive,” which tells the interconnected stories of Cameron Shaw, newly paroled on a manslaughter conviction, and Meghan Quick, a cop and single mother investigating the death of a woman immolated in her own home. Shaw is barely back on the streets before he gets himself entangled with a gang known as the League of Nations; it quickly becomes apparent that his new career as a drug runner and gang enforcer will dovetail violently with Meghan’s investigation. Wiebe is known for his tough, noirish sensibility and he outdoes himself here; even readers familiar with the Wakeland books may be startled by the level of violence and mayhem unleashed in these pages. Don’t let the deceptive cover design fool you: this is no meditative examination of memory and loss. It’s a high-octane thriller that isn’t afraid to pummel its reader with the literary equivalent of the baseball bats the gang members use to dispose of their victims’ bodies. (The discovery of what this entails is liable to give even the most seasoned hard-boiled crime reader shivers.)

The Reappearance of Rachel Price

Holly Jackson

Delacorte Press, 448 pages, $28.99

British novelist Jackson, author of the bestselling YA trilogy “A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder,” “Good Girl, Bad Blood” and “As Good as Dead,” returns with a new thriller that covers some of the same ground as the earlier books, specifically the focus on true crime and its discontents. In “The Reappearance of Rachel Price,” a crew of British filmmakers have descended on the New Hampshire town of Gorham to shoot a documentary about the eponymous woman, a mother who vanished 16 years previously, apparently abandoning her two-year-old daughter, Annabel. Now 18, Bel is as astonished as anyone when her mother turns up one day out of the blue with a story about being held captive by an unknown man. When Bel detects inconsistencies in her mother’s account of what happened, she teams up with the doc’s camera assistant to uncover the truth. The relationship between Bel and Ash, the misfit documentarian, is clichéd to a wincing degree and, after an opening 50 pages of exposition, it’s clear even Jackson realizes there’s a problem: she has Bel eyeing a book she’s been reading in which “the plot hadn’t really got going yet — a lot of backstory,” though there is a promise that “something exciting was going to happen soon.” Sure enough, things do pick up once Rachel reappears though, at close to 500 pages, the pace does flag sporadically. Commentary on the nature of people’s fascination with true crime lends the book crossover potential, though this is ground that has been well trod already, not least by Jackson herself.

Mr. Good-Evening

John MacLachlan Gray

Douglas & McIntyre, 320 pages, $34.95

A Golden Globe winner and member of the Order of 91ԭ��, MacLachlan Gray is probably best known for his stage show “Billy Bishop Goes to War,” but he is also an accomplished crime novelist. His latest, “Mr. Good-Evening,” completes a loose trilogy of historical mysteries set in Vancouver (and known collectively as the Raincoast Noir series). The new book focuses on Ed McCurdy, a print journalist who has made the transition to radio, becoming known by his broadcast moniker, Mr. Good-Evening. McCurdy is one of several people caught up in the case of the so-called Fatal Flapper, a secretary accused of murdering her boss by stabbing him repeatedly with a stiletto shoe. As a homicide detective and a fraud investigator slowly become convinced the woman in custody may be innocent, they face bureaucratic jurisdictional obstacles, while one of the dead man’s partners seems to have mysteriously disappeared. Operating in the periphery is a doomsday cult loosely based on that of the real-life Brother XII and his so-called Aquarian Foundation. Gray’s writing is lucid and frequently funny, but the real draw here is the setting: Prohibition-era Vancouver in the months leading up to the great U.S. stock market crash of 1929. The narrative is highly evocative and somewhat biting: when McCurdy’s boss rails against the new electric technology, convinced it will make print journalism obsolete, the reader can’t help but think he wasn’t wrong, just maybe 100 years ahead of his time.

Point Zero

Seicho Matsumoto; Louise Heal Kawai, translator

Bitter Lemon Press, 320 pages, $25.95

Matsumoto has been called Japan’s Georges Simenon and the comparison is apt. Both writers traffic in dark psychological narratives that plumb the depths of human nature. In “Point Zero,” first published in 1959 and newly translated into English by Louise Heal Kawai, Matsumoto examines the shadowy corners of postwar Japan, with a specific focus on pan-pan women, a loose group of prostitutes, many of them teenagers, who serviced occupying soldiers after the war. As the book opens, Teiko Itane becomes engaged to a businessman named Kenichi Uhara in an arranged marriage. Kenichi leaves Teiko behind in Tokyo to close out some business in the Kanazawa region of Japan; he subsequently disappears, leading Teiko on a quest to determine what happened to him. Matsumoto is not a flashy writer and Kawai’s graceful translation is the epitome of a slow burn; “Point Zero” has much to say about Japanese culture and the ravages of war on a national psyche for readers patient enough to follow the author along the path of his deceptively quiet narrative.