A French assassin whose memory is failing; murders in a Swedish town that no one can leave; and some light crime-solving during an Australian Christmas

Mathilde “likes dogs, but she hates children. Especially girls.” Mathilde “refuses to work with small-calibre firearms, which, she firmly believes, are good only for bourgeois soap operas and adultery”. Mathilde is also 63, a small, stout hero of the French Resistance (it’s 1985, so there are still a fair few of them around) – and a much-in-demand contract killer. No one suspects her. But, after she wipes out her latest target on Paris’s Avenue Foch with “the sort of gun that could stop a stampeding elephant in its tracks”, the readers of Pierre Lemaitre’s truly delicious Going to the Dogs (Mountain Leopard Press) start to realise that her mind isn’t quite what it was. And a contract killer who can’t remember if the name she has written on a piece of paper is her next target or her new cleaner isn’t the safest person to have around. Brilliantly translated by Frank Wynne, this book is a sort of French take on Richard Osman, if Osman were a lot darker and kept on bumping off characters you’d been made to care about. Deft, funny, sharp, and very French – Lemaitre’s detective muses that “there is a certain poetry to the rain falling on the Seine” – it is an absolute delight.

Will Dean returns to his series detective, deaf journalist Tuva Moodyson, in his latest outing, Ice Town (Hodder & Stoughton), a locked-town mystery in which the bodies of local people keep turning up in Esseberg, an atmospherically creepy location in Sweden’s remote centre that can only be reached through a tunnel that closes at night. “There is a special kind of murk that accompanies snow and extreme chill up here. A unique variety of silence.” Tuva is drawn to the case because a deaf teenager from Esseberg has gone missing with no money. “He’s out there and people are screaming his name trying to help him and he can’t hear them,” says his desperate grandmother. As the deaths mount, residents start to leave, the tension grows, and Tuva tries to make inroads into this strange and closed community. “Less than a thousand people. Everyone in everyone else’s business. I think half the town’s been on the verge of a killing spree for decades,” an outsider tells her. I’m not sure I totally bought the payoff, which felt a little preposterous after such a great buildup, but our hero takes it all in her stride and is as compelling as ever. Overall, Ice Town is a thrilling, chilling read for a wintry evening.

To order Going to the Dogs, Ice Town, Everyone This Christmas Has a Secret and The Peacock and the Sparrow, click on the titles or go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply