KARIN FOSSUM may be the most unsentimental crime novelist since Ruth Rendell's alter ego, Barbara Vine. On the very first page of HELL FIRE (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $24), a young mother and her 4-year-old son lie dead of multiple stab wounds in the ramshackle little trailer in the Norwegian woods where they had spent the night. Not far into the story, we're introduced to a character who, we'll very soon deduce, is almost certainly the killer. Surprisingly, anticipating the ending doesn't destroy the suspense; in fact, imagining the horror that awaits actually increases our sense of dread. Lacking the reader's omniscience, Inspector Konrad Sejer must painstakingly piece together the lives of the victims by questioning anyone who might have information about this ghastly crime. Sejer is a thoughtful interviewer, "but he was a serious man and sometimes prone to deep melancholy," so it's inevitable that the more this sensitive detective learns, the more depressed he gets. (At least he's not morbid, like the police pathologist who keeps a pinup photo of the deceased Marilyn Monroe, her face "puffy and formless," hanging in the morgue.) The dead woman, Bonnie Hayden, had no intention of becoming a single mother, but when her husband left her for a younger woman she was forced to put their son, Simon, in day care and become a home health aide. Her elderly clients could be difficult, demanding and sometimes quite mean, like cranky old Erna, who worked her like a dray horse. But they're all in mourning at the unusually well-attended funeral, which comforts Inspector Sejer as much as it saddens him. Another parental bond figures in a parallel plot about a mother's boundless love and a son's obsessive need to find his errant father - or at least his grave. Fossum writes with as much compassion about Thomasine and Eddie Malthe as she does about Bonnie and Simon. But in Kari Dickson's translation there's always something dark hovering on the edge of the page, something about getting what you wish for and the crushing irony when that gift proves your undoing. HARLAN COBEN MUST have been reading Dickens while he was writing HOME (Dutton, $28), in which a flamboyant villain known as Fat Gandhi houses the "workers" in his child prostitution ring in the basement of an entertainment arcade called AdventureLand. Coben's goodguy hero, Myron Bolitar, runs afoul of this nasty piece of work when he answers the call of his best bud, Win Lockwood, who has spotted a missing American boy in London among the young hustlers working the stroll under the King's Cross overpass. Myron may be the one with the hero complex and Win the one with the killer instincts ("I am good with a straight razor"), but when Patrick Moore disappeared 10 years earlier, the kidnappers also took Win's 6-year-old cousin - and family is family. Fans of this popular series, which has been on hiatus for five years (since the publication of "Live Wire"), know the drill: You grab the plot thread and hang on for dear life while Coben yanks it into a noose. Promises are also made of "death and destruction and mayhem" and duly delivered in terrific action scenes, including a wild escape through the tunnel beneath Fat Gandhi's empire. Fun is fun, but the lasting appeal of this series lies in Coben's sympathy for ordinary people who do desperate things when they're swept up in circumstances they can't control. LESS THAN A MONTH before World War I comes to an end, Bess Crawford is shot by a German sniper who didn't notice that she was tending to a wounded soldier. In THE SHATTERED TREE (Morrow/HarperCollins, $25.99), Charles Todd's heroic battlefield nurse is shipped off to a hospital in Rouen, but once she's on the mend her thoughts keep turning to one of her patients, a soldier who wore a French uniform but spoke flawless German when he cried out in pain. Although she's meant to be convalescing, Bess finds ways to carry on her search for this mysterious man, whose snapshot so distresses a nun that she calls him "a monster." As always in this immensely satisfying series, Todd heightens the mystery by setting it within a war-shattered world of battered villages, barren farms and broken people. IF EVER A novel should be read with a friend, Sharon Bolton's DAISY IN CHAINS (Minotaur, $25.99) would be it. (You really don't want to face that mind-blowing ending alone.) Serial killers are meant to be creepy, but Hamish Wolfe, the handsome surgeon convicted of murdering four grossly overweight women, is so charismatic he has legions of female fans. Maggie Rose, a well-known attorney and author, isn't one of them. But Hamish's mother is so sure of his innocence she convinces Maggie to begin researching a book that's meant to exonerate him. Even in rough draft form, it's better written than the dodgy articles and blog posts woven into this twisted plot. Fat-shaming is a real issue. "We associate good looks with goodness," Maggie says. "We just do." Our infatuation with vicious criminals also has consequences. Bolton views her psychologically complex characters with such unsettling insight, it's hard to evade certain cold truths - and harder yet not to wince.