Crime and mystery

Salt’s crime and mystery list favours psychological unease over procedural formula – novels built on flawed narrators, moral compromise and slow-burning dread rather than the comfort of a tidy solve.

Kerry Hadley-Pryce’s Black Country novels (The Black Country, God's Country, Lie of the Land) return again and again to the same unravelling community, while S. J. Galbraith’s The Wythenshawe Dandy brings Northern noir to Manchester's margins. Elsewhere, Livi Michael’s Reservoir and Trevor Mark Thomas’s forthcoming Darker with the Day sit alongside newer voices – Robert Craig, Jude Cook and Ian Nettleton – bringing fresh angles to the genre through 2026 and 2027.

These are books for readers who want their crime fiction to unsettle as much as it entertains.