The Good Guy by Dean Koontz - brilliant as ever and always

AZ: "After a day's work hefting brick and stone, Tim Carrier slakes his thirst at The Lamplighter Tavern. Nothing heavy happens there. It's a friendly workingman's bar run by his good friend Rooney, who enjoys gathering eccentric customers. Working his deadpan humour on strangers is, for Tim, all part of the entertainment. But how could Tim have imagined that the stranger who sits down next to him one evening is about to unmake his world and enmesh him in a web of murder and deceit? The man has come there to meet someone and he thinks it's Tim. Tim's wayward sense of humour lets the misconception stand for a moment and that's all it takes: the stranger hands Tim a fat manila envelope, saying, 'Half of it's there; the rest when she's gone,' and then he's out the door. In the envelope Tim finds the photograph of a woman, her name and address written on the back; and several thick packets of hundred-dollar bills. When an intense-looking man sits down where the first stranger sat and glances at the manila envelope, Tim knows he's the one who was supposed to get it.Shaken, thinking fast, Tim says he's had a change of heart. He removes the picture of the woman and then hands the envelope to the stranger. 'Half what we agreed,' he says. 'For doing nothing. Call it a no-kill fee.' Tim is left holding a photo of a pretty woman, but his sense of fun has led him into a very dangerous world from which there is no way back. The company of strangers has cost him his peace of mind, and possibly his life."

The Scold's Bridle by Minette Walters

"Dr. Sarah Blakeney, the physician who's attended caustic Mathilda Gillespie for the past year, is shaken when her patient is found dead in her bathtub, doped with liquor and barbiturates, wrists slit, and an elaborate cast-iron gag, the scold's bridle, carefully arrayed with flowers and clasped over her face. But Sarah, unhappy in her own domestic life with her husband, Jack, a brilliant, unsuccessful painter, has no idea how close to home this calamity will strike. When Sarah tells Jack she wants a divorce, genre-wise readers will settle back in anticipation of a running analogy between Mathilda's savagely miserable life - she was impregnated by her idiot uncle when she was 13 - and Sarah's present woes. They're in for as big a shock as Sarah when a videotaped last-minute will names her as sole legatee at the expense of Mathilda's beautiful, parasitical daughter, Joanna Lascelles, and her sulky, thieving granddaughter, Ruth. Suddenly the police are cordially interested in Sarah, the Lascelleses coolly enraged at her, charming Jack (who's gone to stay with Joanna while he paints her portrait) a mass of outrageous contradictions, and Mathilda desperately enigmatic. As all the principals begin sensitively, articulately, to torment themselves and each other with their guilty suspicions, Walters (The Sculptress, 1993, etc.) draws out the complications with a master's hand until the monstrous pattern is completed with a final sickening jolt"

The Sculptress by Minette Walters

AZ: "It was a slaughterhouse, the most horrific scene I have ever witnessed...Olive Martin is a dangerous woman. I advise you to be extremely wary in your dealings with her.' The facts of the case were simple: Olive Martin had pleaded guilty to killing and dismembering her sister and mother, earning herself the chilling nickname 'The Sculptress'. This much journalist Rosalind Leigh knew before her first meeting with Olive, currently serving a life sentence. How could Roz have foreseen that the encounter was destined to change her life - for ever?"