Four Blackfeet in a borrowed parade RV drive two thousand miles to bring a child home from the grave he was left in. Jones makes grief, history and slapstick share one cramped camper, and most of the time the fit is perfect.

Hot chocolate, corn dogs, a prom proposal over the stadium speakers, and then gunfire three miles north. A girl from the future who has learned to smile through everything finally stops, and a dark, generous love story begins.

A careful psychiatrist in Merit learns that one patient's nightmares can draw blood, and the discovery reshapes the agency that hunts people like Victor Vale. Schwab's closing Villains novel finds its horror in a gentle voice and its warmth in a makeshift family, though it takes its time getting there.

Two babies are christened together in a Norfolk church in January 1919. Afterwards one family drinks champagne at the Hall and the other eats ham sandwiches at the pub, and only the vicar and the doctor attend both. Archer's last novel is about who gets to cross that line.

A staircase goes down further than a building should allow, and at the bottom a dying woman switches on a ceiling of light over a laboratory that cost her everything she had. She needs a thief to steal a city's worth of electricity for her.

Two people who have spent their lives being watched meet at a creek behind a closed diner, two hours from anyone who would recognise them. What one of them says next undoes forty years of careful construction, and starts the best novel about church respectability in years.

She has refused the tug in her chest for hours. Now she walks into the open, spreads her arms wide, and shouts at a dragon to take her. This is the chapter the whole collection is built to hold.