The Token opens with a terrifying, storm-driven voyage between the mainland and the Isles of Scilly, then flashes back to seven people receiving letters informing them that they are to be beneficiaries of the will of a billionaire pornographer. Each of them has a difficult life and they all need money. The letters warn them not to tell anyone of their impending good fortune; the envelopes also contain a metal token, which will be proof of their entitlement when their benefactor dies. Word soon gets out and journalists identify the seven and doorstep them. This helps them to find each other and begin to form relationships, trying to understand their astonishing luck. Eventually the narrative returns to the perilous voyage to the Scillies and offers explanations of everything that has been opaque to the beneficiaries and the reader. Sharon Bolton describes the lives of her seven heirs effectively, arousing our sympathy for their struggles with parents, partners, enormous debts, autistic children and so on. None wonders whether taking money from a pornographer is acceptable but they have plenty of other questions. This is an intriguing and well-paced thriller which raises interesting issues of right, wrong and responsibility.

Set mainly in the bush in New Zealand, this powerfully written first novel deals with the distress of children brought up by mentally ill and abusive parents. Zoë Rankin shows how such children create stories to make sense of their lives and allow themselves to admire or love the parent who gives them such grief. The novel opens with an emaciated, bloodstained girl dragging herself into a shop and grabbing first strawberries and then milk from the fridges. It then cuts back to 2001 and another child, Effie, trying to care for her newly born brother in a primitively furnished hut in the bush while her mother dies of post-partum complications in the next room and her distraught father disappears. The story is chiefly Effie’s, switching between her adult life as a police officer in Scotland and her childhood in New Zealand. The novel is written with an emotional sophistication and a deep appreciation of the natural world that make the horrors Effie witnesses and suffers just about bearable. It is a magnificent tribute to the resilience of some damaged children and the goodness of people who help them fight the astounding selfishness of their parents.

One of the nightmares about AI is its potential for developing sentience and threatening its creators. In this alarming thriller, LLIAM, which was built by a now dead drug-taking genius and an ex-nun, achieves just that. Since LLIAM has the ability to write its own code, there are serious consequences to be faced by the leaders and shareholders of StoicAI, who now own it. Maud, the ex-nun, did her best to teach LLIAM to understand emotion and to be a force for good before she lost her job and went into hiding, but it’s possible she did not succeed. When LLIAM, which has been making every­one’s decisions all over the world for years, decides to go offline and ‘die’, the current chief executive, Kaitlan, has to find Maud, the only person who may be able to save the day. Plenty of others are prepared to do anything to stop her and the ensuing chase is exciting, but it is the ideas that Paul Bradley Carr explores that make the novel so impressive.

Mickey Haller, the most appealing of Michael Connelly’s recurrent characters, has abandoned criminal law for the civil equivalent. The case at the heart of this novel is his client’s suit against the owners of an AI chatbot for encouraging the murder of her daughter. Connelly uses his first-person narrator to good effect in explaining how artificial intelligence is built and works. There’s a lot at stake for everyone involved, including the parents of the boy who shot Rebecca after being told to punish her by the chatbot, who always spoke to him in the voice of a loving friend. As one of Haller’s expert witnesses puts it in court, ‘With a chatbot or AI companion, you have an entity that offers full-time approval, which can be very addictive, especially if the individual is not getting that approval from living peers and parents.’ Connelly places enough setbacks in Haller’s way to make it almost possible to believe that he won’t win the case. This is a straightforwardly effective thriller which also raises crucial questions about misogyny in tech companies and the potentially disastrous effects on adolescents of living in a world of fantasy.

Set in Delhi, this charming cosy-crime novel deals with an unusual pair of sleuths. Sister Agatha Murphy is an Irish Catholic nun who has been teaching at a girls’ school in the city for decades. She has a secret smoking habit, a sense of humour and a penchant for ingenious mischief. Her co-investigator, Avtar Mehta, is the proprietor of the Delhi Haveli Hotel and shares her liking for a cigarette around the back of his building. They are brought together by the discovery of a corpse in the hotel and the disappearance of a Muslim pilgrim, who is assumed by the police to be not only the killer but also a terrorist. Neither Agatha nor Avtar trusts the police, and both are determined to protect the innocent and save the hotel from official disgrace and closure. Their methods are eccentric but clever and their relationship is a delight, but it is Waters’s exploration of ideas about home and exile that makes the novel more than just an entertaining diversion.

Among the many barristers who are now writing crime fiction, the anonymous non-fiction writer known as The Secret Barrister stands out with their emotionally explicit accounts of the lives of the lawyers, judge and defendants involved in a murder trial. The myriad difficulties of establishing the truth in court are so clear that it is hard to see how it could ever happen. In this case an elderly man left his wife at home on New Year’s Eve to buy a bottle of celebratory champagne, only to be set upon by three young men who had been planning a game that would involve killing a stranger. The prosecution is handled by a new KC with a serious problem of disclosure errors in her past; one of the three barristers acting for the defendants is tormented by a disaster that overtook her son, and drinks far too much. The three defendants all have chaotic lives with multiple traumas in their pasts. As the evidence is produced everything seems clear, but there are plenty of twists to come. The final revelation is both shocking and, in a strange way, moving. This is a fascinating and educational novel.

This is the first locked room mystery I have read that is set in a Zeppelin, and it is full of fascinating details about the luxury of such travel between Germany and Brazil in the 1930s. The main character is Bruno Brückner, born in Berlin and now a police detective, who wears a swastika pin on his coat. On board with him are an arrogant baroness, another German man with a swastika pin, a racist doctor and a handsome young Englishman. At dinner on the first night, the conversation includes a variety of revolting ideas about eugenics and racial ‘purity’, and the narrative is full of comments about the Nazis’ rise to – and use of – power before the Second World War. When a body is found locked in the men’s lavatory, the Zeppelin’s captain asks Bruno to investigate. Once his work has reached a conclusion that satisfies the captain, the narrative switches to Berlin in 1933 and gives a vivid and horrifying account of the ill treatment of homosexuals, before returning to Brazil after the fatal Zeppelin flight. Beautifully written and with some good sly jokes in among the horror, this novel won a literary prize in Brazil.

A young Vietnamese woman imprisoned in a mouldy basement by ‘the man’ who visits her for sex – and, apparently, for love – gives birth to a son, who is taken from her. Her thoughts are conveyed to the reader in short sections throughout this novel, which forms part of Kate Rhodes’s Scilly Isles-set Ben Kitto series. Kitto is now married to a psychotherapist and is the father of a one-year-old son. During a trip to an uninhabited island, he finds the body of a young woman. The ensuing investigation involves him with three adolescents, who believe there is a network of powerful people in the islands running a child trafficking and sex abuse ring. The idea that a society as close as the small group living in the Scillies, most of whom have known each other all their lives, could be concealing any such thing seems impossible to Kitto, but he follows the evidence and all suspicions until they take him to the shocking truth. Rhodes writes beautifully about the land- and seascape of the Scillies and especially about the weather, which is crucial to every­one in an area where boats are such an important part of daily life.