Pleasingly deadpan, The Plotters manages to be both humorous (Reseng’s cats are called, delightfully, Desk and Lampshade) and violent, and sometimes even wise. “You think that if you go up there with a knife and stab the person at the very top, that’ll fix everything,” responds our hero. One assassin on the run from the plotters tells Reseng that he “wanted to find out exactly who was sitting at their desk, twirling their pen and coming up with this bullshit plan”. But Reseng is having reservations about his lifestyle, and starts to wonder if he has fallen foul of the “plotters” – those who run the contract killings. Part of a wave of Korean thrillers translated into English in recent months, The Plotters by Un-su Kim (translated by Sora Kim-Russell 4th Estate) follows the trials and tribulations of Reseng, found in a rubbish bin as a baby, raised in a library where assassinations are planned, and now one of Seoul’s best hitmen. But the crime on which the novel hangs is so dark that I had to set the book aside for a time before I could steel myself and dive back in.

There’s an enjoyably perceptive and driven detective on the case the plot is clever and twisty – and horribly compelling when the bad weather sets in and the missing child still hasn’t been found. “It is as if a chasm has opened up beneath her, and all the castles in the air she has built over the years … are minutes away from being dashed to smithereens.”

It’s on her 25th birthday that a five-year-old child goes missing from a remote hotel she has been staying at with her partner, and the past comes flooding into the present as her identity is revealed. One of them is in prison, while the other has been given a new identity, “just like the reviled Maxine Carr, or James Bulger’s murderers”, for her own safety. Nineteen years later, the now notorious pair are known as the Flower Girls, loathed by the press, “their parents as shocked as the rest of the world at the depravity bubbling up from their gene pool”. The author, a former human rights lawyer, opens her story in 1997, as sisters Rosie and Laurel lure a toddler away from a playground. But even by these standards, Alice Clark-Platts’s The Flower Girls (Raven Books) goes to some very dark places indeed. W e’re not starved for choice these days when it comes to disturbing thrillers: murderous nannies in Leïla Slimani’s Lullaby foully intentioned lovers in, well, the majority of new titles.

The alice network reviews