Crime fiction debuts: The best noir newcomers from Mississippi to Scandinavia

Dark intent: diplomat turned crime novelist Andreas Norman (Caroline Andersson)

Like all addicts, crime readers are always searching for fresh suppliers, so debut novels are especially welcome on the shady sidewalks of noir fiction.

Into a Raging Blaze by a Swedish diplomat, Andreas Norman, translated by Ian Giles (Quercus, £16.99), has lots of solid description of the insides of the corridors of power. Carina Dymek is a high-flier in security, unhappy in the smart suits she is forced to wear at work. She steps out of line by having an Egyptian boyfriend with dubious contacts in the Middle East, and by accepting a memory stick from a mysterious stranger. Will there be a Snowden-showdown whistle-blowing scandal? A leisurely read, as Borgen was a leisurely watch, but definitely one for Intelligence anoraks.

One purveyor of the finest-quality Scandi crime is legendary print-sniffer Anthony Cheetham, co-founder of Quercus, the publishing house which discovered The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. His new baby publishes Joakim Zander's The Swimmer (Head of Zeus, £12.99), which roves around the world following the fate of Klara Waldeen, raised on a remote Swedish island but working in Brussels, and with an ex-spy father who has gone underground in the US. Swimming length after length in the local pool is the only thing keeping the latter sane – that and the determination to find her again. The book has classic first-novel faults – too many characters, too much jumpy intercutting – but builds to exceptional tension.

From repressed Scandinavia to the steamy American South, crime addicts can source their fix from anywhere in the world, and The Weight of Blood by Laura McHugh (Hutchinson, £9.99) takes us to the Mississippi hinterlands. Missouri writer McHugh brings us the oppressive atmosphere of a remote community where to be a stranger is to be both feared and despised. When young Lila accepts a casual job in a small town in the Ozark mountains, she discovers a terrible nest of greed and cruelty. The horrors get passed on to her daughter, whose experience is intercut with her mother's. Who can be trusted, and who is a real psychopath? Very accomplished technically, and a scary psychological study of an introverted rural community.

Moving into more sophisticated territory, Forty Acres by Dwayne Alexander Smith (Faber, £16.99) begins as a traditional legal thriller but opens out into something much bigger as a young New York attorney rises up through the black middle class to meet a supremely rich and powerful group who could buy up much of white America. But there is a price for entry into their ranks – what will Martin, the bright boy from Queens, have to do to join them? And what goes on in inside the walled oasis of Forty Acres? Warning: there is sadism at the heart of this novel – it is for readers to decide its justification.

Also about the black experience, but this time set in Britain, is Heartman by MP Wright, (Black and White, £7.99). UK dealers in the crime scene have been a bit overshadowed of late, but this is a newcomer bursting with life and originality. In 1960s Bristol, an exiled Barbadian suffering from the emotional and meteorological coldness of the Mother Country, searches for a missing deaf-mute girl at the behest of a suspiciously wealthy Jamaican.

Wright says his hero is the US author James Lee Burke, chronicler of crime in the steamy American South. Wright's own atmospheric evocation of the Caribbean community shows that he has absorbed the lessons of the master, while bringing outstanding pace and suspense to this powerful story, which happily allows me to end on a very high note of commendation.