The Wicked Girls by Alex Marwood, Sphere, $29.95

Eleven-year old Jade from the notoriously bad Walker family is never left in any doubt that she won’t amount anything, while young Bel Oldacre is abused by her rich mother and stepfather.

They’re two damaged girls who spend just one day together, one day in which they’re charged with the murder of a four-year old girl.

Years later crime reporter Kirsty Lindsay and funfair cleaner Amber Gordon bump into each other in a grim English seaside town, two women living with a shameful secret, protected by their new names.

But which is Bel and which is Jade? And who is killing young women in this seedy holiday destination?

Alex Marwood interweaves the story of the two girls, and the women they grew up to be with great skill.

It’s a thought-provoking look at crime and rehabilitation wrapped up in a thriller that will have you compulsively flipping pages well into the small hours.

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The Fear Index by Robert Harris, Hutchinson, $19.95

It’s a rare writer who can link the deep-science world of particle physics with the incomprehensible business of hedge-fund management — and make you want to read on.

But Robert Harris does the trick with this edge-of-the-seat thriller about a mathematical genius, Dr Alex Hoffman, designer of a complex computer program which taps into human fear and panic to predict movements on the stock exchange.

He’s now filthy rich (“one billion, ballpark”) and about to launch VIXAL-4, the ultimate, failsafe version of his dealer-machine — when someone breaks into his mansion and things start to unravel.

Because VIXAL-4, like Hal in 2001:A Space Odyssey, is developing a will of its own, threatening not just its creator, but the entire financial system.

Can Hoffman stop his monster in time? The ingenious plot skirts so close to reality it’s hard to know the truth from fiction, making this book not just fun, but genuinely scary.

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Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, Vintage Classics, $12.95

No-one worked a character like Dickens, and this 1861 novel is like a greatest hits collection — eternal spinster Miss Havisham, Magwitch the kindly convict, and at the heart of it all, our narrator, young orphan Pip.

Growing up in the wild marshes of Kent, Pip dreams of becoming a gentleman and his great (if unlikely) expectations are fulfilled when, out of the blue, a mysterious benefactor deeds him a fortune.

He abandons his humble but true friends and moves to the high life in the glittering capital of London — though in the process, Pip loses his essential self, and must double back to find it.

It’s a wildly entertaining journey of pride and fall, laced with the sort of surprises and cliff-hangers that kept Dickens’ readers glued for the next weekly instalment.

You’ll be hearing lots about the great man this year, marking the 200th anniversary of his birth; reading — or possibly, re-reading — this book will help put you in the mood for the Dickens party.

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The Locked Room by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo, Harper Perennial, $19.99

Who are these people with the unprounceable names? They are the pioneers of the Scandinavian crime wave.

A husband-and-wife team who, starting in the mid-60s, wrote 10 legendary detective books — the Martin Beck series — dispelling forever the idealised image of Sweden as a country of saunas, smorgasbords and happy blondes.

Instead, we see a dark and troubled place, reeling under the failures of the Welfare State experiment, where criminals and civilians alike fall through the cracks as policeman Beck goes about his business of solving crimes and fighting with his bosses.

Yet this is also an old-fashioned locked-room mystery, requiring a Holmes-like dissection of how a tossaway drifter could have lain months dead, in a sealed room, with no gun but a bullet in his chest.

So, an interesting amalgam of new and old styles of crime-writing as fresh now as when it was written — and if you’ve ever wondered where Stieg Larsson and the rest got their start, the answer is here.

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The Hanging Garden by Patrick White, Knopf Australia, $29.95

An unpublished manuscript by Australia’s only Nobel Prize-winning author was always going to be big news, and here it is.

Unfinished, it’s true, White having written only a third of the novel before being distracted by politics and his theatre work, but elegantly formed and far easier to read that some of his more magisterial novels.

Set on the shores of Sydney Harbour, two children meet in a wild garden — “a country of lantana and feral cats” — having been either lost or abandoned by their parents during the Second World War.

They are “reffoes”, strangers in a strange land, and form a powerful bond in a city dominated by elderly women who mean to help but are locked into their own values and prejudices. Who knows where he would have taken the story next?

But White’s writing is sharp as a knife and conveys a strong sense of a long-ago time in Australia when a foreigner — even a foreign child — would struggle ever to feel at home.

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The Uninvited Guests by Sadie Jones, Random House Australia, $32.95

What teases on first dipping as a simpering tale of ludicrously upper crust English Edwardian life “above stairs”, crescendos into an almost operatic staging of Dickensian morality.

When a motley crew of injured train passengers are deposited by the faceless Great Central Railway following a rail crash, on the portico of nearby country house Sterne, the toffy Torrington brood have no intention of anything interrupting Emerald’s birthday party.

“Had they seen a maid before? And watch the ornaments and trinkets!” Herding the “fetid” second and third class passengers to the back of the house, baby sibling Smudge plays tiddlywinks and her pony, aware though that “the feeling in the house suddenly was unlike any she had ever known before.”

Amid mounting menace the parlour games give way to a tension not dissimilar to an advancing chorus from Les Miserables! Jones’ astute observations of the differences between “classes” make for bawdy, ballsy reading.

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Floundering by Romy Ash, Text Publishing, $27.95

“How come you left us?” asks Jordy of absent-for-a-year mum Loretta, as she collects him and little brother(narrator Tommo), unannounced, from Gran’s tidy house, where cordial comes in plastic beakers and sheets are tucked in too tight. “I never left ya. I was always coming to get you,” flashes back Loretta.

So, life on the road lurches ahead, days nicking meat pies at servos, with nights seeking out a safe place to sleep.

Played out under a scorching Australian sun at truck stops on non-descript highways, Australian author Romy Ash’s gentle touch is reminiscent of Tim Winton’s Cloud Street and John Fingleton’s Surviving Maggie.

“I know when we’ve come to a proper town ‘cos the radio works again,” frightened Tommo tell us.

Floundering, like dying fish, Jordy takes charge when they are inevitably abandoned again, and as he earns them a glass of cold coke and a handful of warm licorice from the old guy at the caravan park, Tommo observes, “He closes his eyes and it’s like a cloud passing over the sun.”

This stunningly beautiful novel with a timeless theme of never letting go falters towards the end, but is a truly impressive debut.

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Mad Men, Bad Girls and the Guerilla Knitters Institute by Maggie Groff, Pan Macmillan, $27.99

Maggie Groff brings us an irresistibly laid-back debut novel, set against a beloved Byron Bay with the magic, magnetism, charm and colourful characters reminiscent of Armistead Maupin’s cult Tales of the City series.

Groff’s tale is set in a commune — swaying with blue-smocked women with “Judy Jetson pony-tails” and names that conjure up drag queens (Cinnamon Toast will birth son Bruschetta) — and features appealing journalist protagonist, Scout Davis, as she investigates the “kidnapping” of a woman suffering from post-natal depression by the Gold Coast cult.

Bad girl Scout is happily seduced by a ripped surfie cop (while her press agency partner is in Afghanistan), and, casts a hilarious figure as a shadowy night member of the GKI (Guerrilla Knitters Institute) whose woven spiders’ webs lace trees, and orange knitted wigs on rubber swim caps (think Julia Gillard) were spun to “further the status of women in government”! Enormous fun.

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