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The Rivals

Amateur sleuth Claudia Lin delves into a dating app conspiracy in Jane Pek’s entertaining, thought-provoking The Rivals.
Amateur sleuth Claudia Lin delves into a dating app conspiracy in Jane Pek’s entertaining, thought-provoking The Rivals.
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Sparring Partners

Review by G. Robert Frazier

For his many fans, a new book from John Grisham is always a reason to celebrate, but audiobook listeners are in for a treat thanks to the excellent voice talents of Jeff Daniels, Ethan Hawke and January LaVoy.

Sparring Partners (10 hours) comprises three legal-thriller novellas, including “Homecoming,” a new story starring Grisham’s beloved hero Jake Brigance. Daniels (known for his roles in Dumb & Dumber, “American Rust,” “The Newsroom” and more) brings Jake and his supporting cast of characters to vibrant life. His playful Southern drawl is particularly fun when voicing Jake’s sometime legal partner and rival Harry Rex. 

Actor and novelist Hawke brings a more youthful vibe to Cody Wallace, the narrator of “Strawberry Moon,” with a performance marked by deadpan humor and emotional angst. In his final hours on death row for murder, Cody is both incredulous of and moved by the series of visitors to his cell. Award-winning audio narrator LaVoy capably voices the titular tale about feuding brothers who inherited a law firm from their father, who’s on the verge of a pardon from his prison sentence.

All three narrators highlight Grisham’s storytelling trademark: fascinating characters facing unusual circumstances with wry humor and real emotion.

Actors Jeff Daniels, Ethan Hawke and January LaVoy highlight John Grisham's wry humor and emotion in these three legal-thriller novellas.
Mystery & Suspense

Fall 2022 preview: Most anticipated mysteries & thrillers

Feature by Savanna, Associate Editor

Some of our most beloved, stalwart series return and a handful of promising sleuths make their debuts in the mysteries and thrillers we’re most excited to read this autumn.

Killers of a Certain Age by Deanna Raybourn
Berkley | September 6

The author of the Veronica Speedwell series, which are easily some of the best historical mysteries around, is taking a quick break from Victorian England to grace us with this contemporary story of four assassins on the verge of retirement. In Killers of a Certain Age, instantly lovable Mary Alice, Natalie, Billie and Helen go on an all-expenses-paid farewell vacation after 40 years spent working for a network of killers known as the Museum. It quickly becomes clear that the trip is a trap, and the company is attempting to tie up loose ends.

The Bullet That Missed by Richard Osman
Pamela Dorman | September 20

If you like your cozy mysteries with more than a dash of snippy, quirky British humor, chances are you’re already obsessed with the Thursday Murder Club series. In author Richard Osman’s third outing, his charming group of retirees obsessed with cold cases and whodunits must solve a mystery while also facing ghosts from a member’s secretive pasts.

We Spread by Iain Reid
Scout | September 27

Is there anyone better than Iain Reid at writing thrillers that aren’t just scary, but also viscerally, existentially unsettling? The writer behind haunting novels such as I’m Thinking of Ending Things returns this fall with We Spread. A suspenseful tale that explores the horrors of aging, memory and time, We Spread follows Penny, an artist who’s recently moved into a long-term care residence that might be too good to be true. 

Calypso, Corpses, and Cooking by Raquel V. Reyes
Crooked Lane | October 11

Reyes’ Mango, Mambo, and Murder was an all-time great cozy mystery debut. It was impossible not to fall in love with cooking show star Miriam Quiñones-Smith as readers rooted for her to not just solve her first case but also embrace her new life in a Miami suburb. Reyes ups the ante in her sophomore novel, as a slew of murders take place right before the most cozy-appropriate holiday of all: Halloween.

Lavender House by Lev AC Rosen
Forge | October 18

Set in 1952 San Francisco, Lev AC Rosen’s historical mystery has all the pulpy turns of phrase and foggy atmosphere of a midcentury noir, with a twist: The Lamontaines, the fabulously wealthy, very mysterious family at the heart of the case, are all queer and live a safe but secluded life thanks to their fortune. PI Evander Mills, who was recently fired from the local police force after getting caught at a gay bar during a raid, has been hired to uncover who killed the Lamontaine matriarch. He’ll have to resist the lure of the family’s glamour and relative freedom to figure out which of them is the murderer. 

Anywhere You Run by Wanda M. Morris
William Morrow | October 25

Wanda M. Morris burst onto the scene last year with her cunning and addicting debut thriller, All Her Little Secrets. For her sophomore novel, Morris will take on a dual-narrative structure that follows two Black sisters in 1964 as they flee their Southern hometown after one of them kills a white man.

No Strangers Here by Carlene O’Connor
Kensington | October 25

The author of two absolutely delightful cozy series set in Ireland, Carlene O’Connor will transition to something much darker and more serious with No Strangers Here. Billed as a mashup of Louise Penny and Tana French, this moody small-town mystery starts with the death of Jimmy O’Reilly, whose body is discovered leaning against a boulder, facing toward the sea.

Sign Here by Claudia Lux
Berkely | October 25

Peyote Trip (yes, that is actually his name) is on the cusp of a huge promotion—he just needs to get one more member of the wealthy Harrison family to sign their soul away. Peyote, you see, is a bureaucrat on the fifth floor of Hell, which is basically the world’s absolute worst corporate office. His fiendish plot goes awry in Claudia Lux’s entertaining, sneakily poignant debut thriller.

The Devil’s Blaze by Robert Harris
Pegasus | November 1

There are a lot of Sherlock Holmes series out there, but Robert J. Harris’ has the best twist on the format. His Sherlock is inspired by the beloved films starring Basil Rathbone as the Great Detective, most of which were set in World War II-era Britain. To foil a mysterious string of assassinations thought to be the work of the Nazis, Holmes must team up with his ultimate enemy, Professor James Moriarty. Seeing Harris’ midcentury take on one of literature’s most iconic villains is just one of the many reasons to be excited about The Devil’s Blaze.  

Secluded Cabin Sleeps Six by Lisa Unger
Park Row | November 8

Lisa Unger’s intelligent, character-driven thrillers feel zeitgeisty without ever tipping into exploitative territory.In her latest novel, she turns to an experience many have had during this era of socially distant travel: the isolated cabin vacation. Of course, spotty Wi-Fi and awkward conversations are the least of what Unger’s protagonist, Hannah, has to worry about. For one thing, her tech mogul brother has sprung for a luxury cabin, complete with a private chef. For another, all the tensions and secrets between Hannah, her family and her friends seem to be on the verge of boiling over. And then there’s the matter of the vacation home’s bloody history . . .

Bleeding Heart Yard by Elly Griffiths
Mariner | November 15

Griffiths pingpongs back and forth between her Ruth Galloway, Brighton and Harbinder Kaur series at the incredible rate of several books a year and shows no signs of slowing down. Her latest Harbinder Kaur mystery follows Cassie Fitzgerald, who killed someone with her group of friends when they were all still in school and now works as a police officer. When one of those friends is killed at their school reunion, Cassie tries to steer the investigation away from her past from the inside, while inwardly suspecting that one of her old chums is responsible for the murder.

The Twist of a Knife by Anthony Horowitz
Harper | November 15

The Hawthorne and Horowitz mysteries are the meta take on the genre that all other meta mysteries aspire to be. In typical fashion, Anthony Horowitz isn’t content to rest on his laurels and has decided to up the ante in his latest whodunit starring brilliant former detective Daniel Hawthorne and a fictionalized version of the author. This time, Horowitz isn’t just the narrator—he’s also the main suspect.

A World of Curiosities by Louise Penny
Minotaur | November 29

Chief Inspector Armand Gamache isn’t just a great sleuth, he’s a character that readers have grown to love over the past 17 installments in Louise Penny’s bestselling series. Fans will be thrilled and anxious then, to learn of Gamache’s latest case, which concerns a young man and woman who return to the idyllic town of Three Pines, Quebec. Their mother was murdered there years ago, and that killing was the very first case that Gamache and Jean-Guy Beauvoir, his protégé-turned-son-in-law, worked together. The mystery of why the victim’s children would return to Three Pines all these years later brings back haunting memories for both Gamache and Beauvoir. Add in the discovery of a creepy room that’s been sealed off for 150 years, and it seems like all of Three Pines’ darkest stories are about to crawl into the light.

The Widowmaker by Hannah Morrissey
Minotaur | December 6

Hello, Transcriber, Hannah Morrissey’s bleak and impressive debut mystery, marked her as a writer to watch. In The Widowmaker, she returns to Transcriber’s setting of Black Harbor, Wisconsin, but switches the point of view from police transcriber Hazel Greenlee to photographer Megan Mori and investigator Ryan Hudson.  

Discover all our most anticipated books of fall 2022.

Welcome the chill with 14 shiver-inducing whodunits.
Mystery & SuspenseHistorical Mystery

The spies caught out in the cold

Feature by Carole V. Bell

When you’re a spy, regime change is tricky. Even positive shifts can make for treacherous times. Two novels uncover the messy, uncertain lives of intelligence operatives in times of tectonic political change: Allison Montclair’s The Unkept Woman explores English life after World War II, at the dawn of the Cold War, while Dan Fesperman’s Winter Work illuminates the turmoil surrounding German reunification as the Cold War was coming to a shaky close. 

The Unkept Woman

A lighter riff on the espionage novel, Montclair’s The Unkept Woman is the fourth in a series about two women—Gwendolyn Bainbridge, an upper-class widow, and Iris Sparks, a former British spy—who run the Right Sort Marriage Bureau, a matchmaking service launched in the wake of WWII. 

Witty and suspenseful, the novel brims with Noël Coward-esque banter. The primary mystery is how Helen Joblanska, an aspiring Right Sort client, ended up dead in Iris’ apartment. And why was a woman tailing Iris in the days before the murder? The events may or may not have something to do with the sudden reappearance and subsequent disappearance of Andrew Sutton, Iris’ married former lover and fellow spy, who had recently turned up on her doorstep looking for a place to hide out. 

As the prime suspect in Helen’s murder, Iris is determined to find the truth, but she’s facing strong tail winds. The local authorities are openly hostile due to their resentment of her involvement in previous cases, and Gwen is unable to help Iris as her own freedom and future are hanging in the balance. She has been trying to recover custody of her son and her inheritance, but having once been labeled a “lunatic” and committed to an asylum by her family, it’s an uphill battle.

Montclair paints a compelling portrait of two intelligent, formidable women working against systems and circumstances that put them at a distinct disadvantage. They’ve grown used to having careers and being in charge of their own fates, often in the absence of men. But both Iris and Gwen are considered disreputable, and the social change they represent is seen by some to be a monstrous encroachment on the normal social order. As unruly women in an uncertain time, Iris and Gwen are as intriguing as the mystery they’re investigating.

★ Winter Work

Like The Unkept Woman, Dan Fesperman’s Winter Work savvily leverages the inherent messiness of the life of a spy. When Lothar Fischer, a colonel in the now-defunct East German foreign intelligence service (more commonly known as the Stasi), is found dead in the woods near his dacha, his right-hand man, Emil Grimm, is determined to find out what really happened. Some suspect suicide, as many other senior Stasi officials have made that choice in the face of potential prosecution now that the Berlin Wall has fallen, but Emil thinks that’s nonsense. To complicate matters, the surrounding neighborhood is thick with former spies, and there’s soon a scuffle over jurisdiction. 

As a sympathetic Stasi officer, Emil provides a fascinating perspective for Western readers. In addition to the troubles of being an aging Cold Warrior, Emil also worries about his wife, who is seriously ill with Lou Gehrig’s disease. With the Stasi dismantled amid the general upheaval, Emil’s income and health care are uncertain, which makes his situation particularly precarious.

As Emil scrambles to make sense of what happened to Lothar while trying to secure his future, Fesperman effectively balances building the mystery with illustrating the broader historical context and personal stakes. The social dynamics in the story are handled brilliantly, with the lines between personal and political motivations appropriately nuanced throughout. There are a multitude of competing interests in Berlin, chiefly Russians trying to shut down the flow of information and Americans offering top dollar to informants. For Emil, who has long since lost his belief in the East German system and grown wary of surveillance in his own life, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev is a shaky figure who can’t be relied upon to help displaced men like him in this new world order. With the Russian leader “too preoccupied with making the Americans fall in love with his new Perestroika,” some of Emil’s fellow officials are looking for hope in other figures. In a chillingly prophetic note, one of them is Vladimir Putin: “The KGB station chief in Dresden, that Putin fellow, is as outraged as we are,” they remark. The heavy toll of authoritarianism looms over the entire proceeding, making for a complex tale that will have readers rooting for a Stasi agent.

Regime change, murder—and matchmaking? In two thrilling novels, spies both former and current contend with a host of challenges.
Mystery & SuspenseThriller

The Last to Vanish

Review by Elyse Discher

Megan Miranda knows how to land a twist, and her latest thriller demonstrates that to dizzying effect. Set in an isolated and hazardous pocket of the Appalachian Mountains, The Last to Vanish elegantly builds a near-gothic atmosphere as it tells the story of an inn with a troubled past and the locals who are keeping deadly secrets.

Abigail Lovett loves her quiet job at the Passage Inn in Cutter’s Pass, North Carolina. The inn butts up against the Appalachian Trail, catering to guests looking to lose themselves in nature. Unfortunately, Cutter’s Pass has a dark history of people becoming lost for good. Decades ago, a group of college students, dubbed the Fraternity Four, vanished while on a hike. Over the years, two women also disappeared. Most recently, a journalist named Landon West set out to write about the strange history of Cutter’s Pass only to disappear himself. Now Landon’s brother, Trey, has arrived at the Passage Inn to try and find clues to his brother’s whereabouts. Most of the town’s residents attribute the mysterious goings-on to accidents on the trail, but Landon’s disappearance unsettled Abby, and now she’s starting to wonder if they are all connected.

A pervasive sense of unease runs throughout The Last to Vanish, whether Abby is facing the dangers of the mountains or the sneaking suspicion that the locals are monitoring her every move. The Passage Inn is a character in itself with quirks, secrets and dark basement rooms. Facing all these strange happenings at what used to be her comforting, calm place of work further spooks Abby: The phones keep going down, and one of her co-workers quits with only a brief note explaining her departure.

As the novel progresses, Miranda slowly gives readers more information about Abby, which only leads to more questions: Where did she come from before she, rather suddenly, arrived in Cutter’s Pass, and why did she decide to live and work at the inn in the first place? She’s not quite an unreliable narrator but rather one whose personal details are revealed with careful precision by Miranda, who ensures that Abby is fascinating, not frustrating. 

A perfectly balanced cross between a cold-case mystery and a psychological thriller, The Last to Vanish‘s expert plotting and surprising twists will delight readers.

Megan Miranda's latest is a perfectly balanced cross between a cold-case mystery and a psychological thriller that features a fascinating amateur sleuth.
Mystery & SuspenseMysteryCozy Mystery

A Killing in Costumes

Review by Jamie Orsini

A Killing in Costumes, Zac Bissonnette’s first Hollywood Treasures mystery, deftly balances a tightly plotted mystery with glamorous characters and a unique setting in the world of movie memorabilia.

Decades ago, Cindy Cooper and Jay Allan were bona fide celebrities. The married-in-real-life performers starred as a couple in a popular soap opera to great acclaim—until they decided to reveal their true sexual orientations to the world. Jay and Cindy lost their acting careers and ended their marriage but remained close friends. 

They now own Hooray for Hollywood, a movie memorabilia store in Palm Springs, California. Business is slow, and they’re in danger of having to close the shop for good until they’re offered a chance to represent retired silver screen legend Yana Tosh in the sale of her personal collection of film costumes and memorabilia. When a vice president of the auction house competing for Yana’s collection is found dead, Jay and Cindy become suspects in the investigation. To clear their names, keep their business afloat and win Yana’s collection, the friends must work together to solve the case—before the killer strikes again.

Bissonnette does an exceptional job constructing A Killing in Costume‘s central whodunit: Each entertaining suspect has believable motives and opportunities, and mystery fans are sure to appreciate his deftly hidden clues. But the heart of the story lies in Cindy and Jay’s close friendship, which has weathered the collapse of their careers, new jobs and relationships, and every success and loss along the way. Both are deeply funny people who are fiercely protective of each other, and their passion for and knowledge of the film industry will delight readers who are also movie buffs. Finally, Cindy’s struggle to find a new normal after the loss of her beloved wife to cancer provides a serious note that is both touching and authentic.

A Killing in Costumes has all the hallmarks of a great cozy: a unique setting, an intriguing cast of characters and an exciting mystery.

A Killing in Costumes has all the hallmarks of a great cozy: a unique setting, an intriguing cast of characters and an exciting mystery.
Mystery & SuspenseThriller

Just Like Home

Review by Mya Alexice

In Sarah Gailey’s latest thriller, a woman returns to her childhood home and comes face to face with the trauma of her youth.

Just Like Home opens with Vera Crowder returning to the house her father built to care for her ailing mother. Daphne Crowder—who insists Vera call her Daphne, not Mom—is barely alive, a pale imitation of the strict mother figure readers get glimpses of through Vera’s flashbacks: “The cold authority had drained out of Vera’s mother like brake fluid from a cut line.”

It is immediately apparent that something violent and bizarre, something far worse than standard mother-daughter tension, has ruptured Vera and Daphne’s relationship. When people recognize Vera in town, they react with horror, and when her past is revealed at work, she loses her job almost immediately. Just Like Home reveals the facts of the Crowder House tragedy early on but unearths the emotional fallout of the events expertly and slowly, meditating on the possible culpability of everyone involved.

In addition to being an excellently crafted thriller, Just Like Home is scary enough to satisfy horror fans, particularly those who revel in disturbing images and suffocating settings. Gailey lends the Crowder House all the intensity of a living being as claustrophobic scenes unravel within its dilapidated walls.

An excavation of tense and toxic family dynamics, Just Like Home uses atmospheric scenes of supernatural horror to unpack the impact of a traumatic event. And Gailey goes even further, observing throughout their terrifying tale that any of us could be haunted—whether by gender ideology, the weight of secrets or the actions of our family members—while bravely refusing to offer clear-cut answers about the nature of good and evil.

An excavation of toxic family dynamics, Sarah Gailey's Just Like Home uses atmospheric scenes of supernatural horror to reveal the terrors that haunt us all.
Mystery & SuspenseMystery

The Kingdoms of Savannah

Review by Linda M. Castellitto

George Dawes Green made a huge splash onto the literary scene with his mid-1990s bestsellers, The Caveman’s Valentine and The Juror. The release of his critically acclaimed third novel, Ravens, came 14 years later. And now, 13 years after that, Green is back with the intriguing and immersive The Kingdoms of Savannah, a darkly mesmerizing mystery that will enthrall readers with its original premise and characters as Green escorts them through the titular city’s glittering society circles, criminal underworld and extensive homeless community, all rife with terrible secrets past and present.

While Savannah, Georgia, has, as one character muses, “all the conviviality and the outrageous beauty and the characters and the sunlight and the aromas,” it also “rests upon a bed of history so vile no novelist could invent it,” as the author writes in a note at the book’s beginning. What Green did invent, though, is the wealthy and powerful Musgroves, a white family whose roots in the city reach back to the 1800s. When Luke, a young man experiencing homelessness, is found stabbed to death in a decrepit building and his friend Stony, a 43-year-old Black woman who works as a contract archaeologist, goes missing, Morgana Musgrove is hired to investigate. (One of her late husband’s many businesses was a detective agency, you see.) The owner of the building where Luke’s body was found is the mobster-esque Archie Guzman, and he’s offering a lot of money for answers as to what happened. But why does Guzman care about Luke and Stony? And why is he insisting Morgana play detective?

Morgana’s granddaughter Jaq, an amateur documentarian, and estranged son Ransom, who’s been living at an encampment under the highway, join her on the case. The trio pingpongs off one another in ways that are both entertaining and poignant, their different life experiences and painful histories affecting how they see both one another and the case. Family secrets bubble up to the surface even as the trio ignores ruffled society-people feathers and you’d-better-back-off threats. Green follows Morgana, Jaq and Ransom on their quest for truth, moving between marvelous mansions and homeless encampments, police stations and dive bars. All the while, ghost-tour carriages rattle by in the background, serving as chilling reminders of tragedy twisted into glib entertainment.

Green’s historical notes at the end of the book offer fascinating details about the real-life people and events that inspired him to write The Kingdoms of Savannah, which is a masterful and multifaceted work: finely crafted mystery, thought-provoking social commentary and an indelible portrait of a complicated city.

The Kingdoms of Savannah is a finely crafted mystery, a thought-provoking social commentary and an indelible portrait of the titular city.
Mystery & SuspenseThrillerHistorical Mystery

Natasha Pulley’s Cold War-set thriller was inspired by secret—and terrifying—Soviet towns

Behind the Book by Natasha Pulley

In The Half Life of Valery K, the titular Soviet scientist is released from a Siberian prison and transported to a town called City 40, which seems to be absolutely suffused with unhealthy levels of radiation. The most frightening thing? As Natasha Pulley reveals, towns like City 40 really did exist.

In the 1960s, across the Soviet Union, there were cities without real names. Instead, they had numbers that corresponded to P.O. boxes in towns miles away: Semipalatinsk 21, Chelyabinsk 40. Sometimes, even more ominously, they had code names like the Installation, the Terminal and the Lake. These cities did not appear on maps, the people who lived there couldn’t leave—many couldn’t even contact relatives on the outside—and they absolutely could not discuss what went on there.

These places were atomgrads: secret cities that hid the Soviet nuclear program.

It sounds like the plot of a Bond novel, but this system was actually an answer to the biggest problem the Soviet Union ever faced: how to keep the Americans from doing to Moscow what had been done to Hiroshima. The Soviet Union had a formidable nuclear arsenal, but the atomgrads made it so that very few people knew where all the parts were, how they fit together—or what the consequences would be if someone tried a hot war instead of a cold one.

 “The truth is so bizarre that it doesn’t sound like it can be right . . .”

I didn’t know about any of this until recently; I just stumbled over it. When the TV show “Chernobyl” came out a couple of years ago, I loved it so much I read Serhii Plokhy’s brilliant Chernobyl: The History of a Nuclear Catastrophe for background. In it, he mentioned something that nearly knocked me off my chair. One of the reasons the scientists at Chernobyl had some idea about what to do when the plant’s nuclear reactor melted down was that this had happened before, at a place called Ozersk. Plokhy didn’t say anything else about it in his book, so I started looking into it.

Ozersk is a code name, derived from the Russian word ozero, which just means “lake.” Its other name is Chelyabinsk 40, meaning City 40. It was—and still is—part of that network of secret atomgrads. In the ’60s, City 40’s speciality was producing weapons-grade plutonium.

Late in 1957, something happened in City 40. We still don’t know exactly what. But we do know that thousands of kilometers of land around City 40 were irradiated. We also know that hundreds of people in a city 90 kilometers away were admitted to the hospital with radiation sickness. If people that far away were that sick, the amount of radiation released must have been enormous.

But unlike Chernobyl, hardly anyone in the West has heard of City 40, even today. In fact, when Soviet scientist Zhores Medvedev broke the news of it to the Western press in the 1970s, nobody believed him. A lot of Western scientists outright rubbished what he said. Nobody could accept that there had been a major nuclear disaster that stayed secret. But it did.

Read our starred review of ‘The Half Life of Valery K’ by Natasha Pulley.

After I read Medvedev’s book about the disaster, and saw the declassified CIA documents he attached to it, I started writing. I started learning Russian and looking at archive footage and poking through the website for Rosatom, Russia’s current nuclear agency, which has plenty of information about City 40. I did a course on nuclear physics so I could actually understand the documents I was finding. The picture that emerged was so strange it could have been from a comic book, and I think that’s partly how it stayed secret. The truth is so bizarre that it doesn’t sound like it can be right: hundreds of thousands of people exposed to radiation and radioactive land that remains dangerous today; widespread health problems even now because of it; and at the heart of it, a facility called Mayak—the Lighthouse—that actually produced the polonium that killed Alexander Litvinenko, a prominent critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, in 2006.

All this led to The Half Life of Valery K, which is about a scientist sent to work at City 40 in 1963, and what happens when he starts staring too hard at its secrets.

Photo of Natasha Pulley © Jamie Drew.

In the 1960s, the Soviet Union covered up a Chernobyl-level nuclear disaster. Natasha Pulley's new thriller, The Half Life of Valery K, reveals the truth.
Mystery & SuspenseThriller

The House Across the Lake

Review by Lauren Emily Whalen

A Riley Sager novel is a guaranteed wild ride, and the New York Times bestseller’s hotly anticipated sixth book, The House Across the Lake, is no different. Sager is the literary equivalent of a master chef, using a deft hand to configure tasty ingredients—a complex, grieving woman with alcoholism; a missing supermodel with dangerous secrets behind her dazzling smile; and the picturesque lake that brings them together—then adding a generous pinch of pulp and a delicious surprise at the end. The result is an addictive beach read that fans will devour in one sitting and leave feeling thoroughly sated.

Rear Window meets Lake Placid in the story of Casey Fletcher, a character actress with a complicated legacy. Her mother, legendary musical theater performer Lolly Fletcher, who prefers hoofing it on stage to providing emotional support, has shipped her off to the family cottage and ordered Casey to relax and reflect. Casey is also supposed to stay sober, which is all but impossible given her grief over the recent accidental death of her husband, Len, in the lake right next to the cottage. Enter Tom and Katherine Royce, a tech mogul and retired model, respectively, who are staying in the glass house across the lake. A tentative friendship between the women ensues, but soon after, Katherine disappears without a trace. Is Tom responsible? How about hunky handyman Boone? Or do the answers lie in the body of water that claimed the love of Casey’s life?

Sager (Survive the Night, Home Before Dark) balances the novel’s short timeline and limited setting with rich characterization for all, especially Katherine, whom the reader meets as she nearly drowns in the dark, freezing lake, and Casey, whose never-ending supply of snarky one-liners and wisecracks never quite camouflages the deep emotional turmoil that ended her once-successful acting career. The House Across the Lake is a psychological thriller that’s thoroughly personality-driven, following women whose motives, means and opportunities are as murkily fascinating as the titular loch.

Riley Sager’s latest thriller is an addictive beach read that fans will devour in one sitting—and leave feeling thoroughly sated.
Mystery & SuspenseMystery

Local Gone Missing

Review by Lauren Emily Whalen

Nothing ever happens in Ebbing—until one horrific weekend. Local Gone Missing follows a variety of residents in the tiny English seaside town, from an inquisitive cleaning lady with a dark past to vacationers with a secret agenda. It all comes to a head during a chaotic musical festival, one that ends with dual overdoses, a possible murder and a host of spilled secrets. Hopping back and forth before and after the incidents, New York Times bestselling author Fiona Barton spins a tangled web of dirty money, bloodshed and deceit.

For Dee Eastwood, a cleaning woman and wife of a recovering addict, it’s business as usual until one of her clients, the demanding Pauline, asks if Dee has seen Pauline’s husband, Charlie. The retired, formerly wealthy couple are living in a trailer until they have the money to fix up their crumbling estate, and Charlie has been struggling to pay the residential facility fees for his adult daughter, Birdie, who incurred a brain injury after a home invasion decades ago. Meanwhile, Detective Elise King, newly in remission from breast cancer, recalls seeing Charlie pre-disappearance at Ebbing’s first music festival—right before two young people overdosed on drugs of unknown origin. Are the two events related? When Elise finds Charlie’s decomposing body, even more questions arise.

Though Local Gone Missing‘s plot is wonderfully twisty with a surprising and satisfying conclusion, it’s the characters who stand out. Ebbing’s weekenders have their own complex motivations—especially a mild-mannered gay caterer and a middle-age father who are mysteriously connected to each other, and maybe to Charlie as well—but it’s the locals who will really draw readers in. Foremost among them is the compelling and well-drawn Elise, who’s struggling to adjust to life back on the force after returning from medical leave. Her retired librarian neighbor Ronnie, who’s eager to play amateur sleuth and surprisingly adept at sussing out clues, provides much-needed comic relief in this intense story of greed gone terribly wrong. Thanks to Barton’s airtight plotting and impeccable characterization, a minibreak by the sea will never seem relaxing again.

Using airtight plotting and impeccable characterization, Fiona Barton spins a tangled web of dirty money, bloodshed and deceit in Local Gone Missing.
Mystery & SuspenseMystery

Whodunit: August 2022

Feature by Bruce Tierney

To Kill a Troubadour

Everyone’s favorite French police chief Benoît Courrèges—aka, Bruno, Chief of Police—faces a new threat to his usually bucolic Périgord existence: Spanish terrorists protesting the Catalonia separatist movement. As Martin Walker’s To Kill a Troubadour opens, controversy swirls around “Song for Catalonia,” a wildly popular song that, because of its tacit support for the separatists, has recently been banned by the Spanish government. Les Troubadours, the music group that popularized the song, are gearing up for a free concert in Périgord that promises to be the best-attended event of the summer. Meanwhile, Spanish nationalist extremists have been observed crossing the border into France, intent on inflicting mayhem—or worse—on the assembled music lovers who have given voice to the separatist movement. Then a bullet is found in the wreckage of a recently stolen car, a bullet designed for a high-powered sniper rifle that can kill from several kilometers away. Bruno fears snipers will set their crosshairs on the crowd, on the band or on the songwriter, who openly sympathizes with the Catalonia movement, but the real scheme is much, much worse. But do not fear—despite the tenser-than-usual plot, all of Walker’s fan-favorite characters are present and accounted for, as well as all of Bruno’s treasured pastimes: sports competitions, gourmet cooking and, of course, his engaging basset hound, Balzac.

★ The Shadow Lily

Swedish author Johanna Mo returns with The Shadow Lily, the suspense-laden second book in her series featuring police detective Hanna Duncker, who, after years of working in Stockholm’s urban center, has returned to her small island homeland of Öland. Both Hanna and the other islanders have mixed feelings about her return, as her father was convicted of one of the most brutal murders the community has ever seen. In her latest case, Hanna is tasked with locating a missing man and his infant son, knowing that as the hours tick by, the chances of finding them alive grow smaller and smaller. Mo employs alternating perspectives to great effect, using them to deepen the reader’s understanding of the events and the characters involved. One arc covers the final day of a character who is killed off relatively early in the narrative; in the second, we observe the day-to-day police procedural; in the third, Mo reveals the backstory of the victim from the first arc and the decisions that led to his untimely end. But most compelling of all, The Shadow Lily sheds further light on what drove Hanna back home: the visceral need to know the whole story about her father.

Death Doesn’t Forget

Jing-nan, a dumpling stall operator in a Taipei night market, is not your typical food dude. He is a tech-savvy social media influencer, a born marketer—and an inadvertent sleuth. While Jing-nan is cursed with nefarious family members and cronies, Death Doesn’t Forget starts out with some good fortune: Jing-nan’s girlfriend’s mother, Siu-lien, wins half of a sizable lottery, which she must share with her ne’er-do-well boyfriend. But by the very next day, the good fortune has all dried up. The boyfriend has been killed, the winnings are in the wind and Jing-nan is on the hook for finding, if not the murderer, at least the missing money. Complicating matters further is the fact that Jing-nan’s girlfriend, Nancy, wants to get married. Barring that, she wants a proposal that she can consider, so that “the egg timer would be set . . . a countdown to either getting married or breaking up for good.” Siu-lien looks on this union with disfavor, but successfully returning her money would go a long way toward warming her chill toward Jing-nan. Author Ed Lin recounts all this cultural and familial interplay with good humor, peppering the text with Taiwanese bromides both old and new. (My favorite is this gem regarding prison terms: “Sentences handed down were longer than the gaps between Ang Lee films.”) With its great suspense and plot development, Death Doesn’t Forget is good fun all-round.

★ The Murder Book

Mark Billingham’s Detective Inspector Tom Thorne books are consistently excellent, but his 18th entry in the popular series, The Murder Book, raises the bar considerably. In a twist that will thrill longtime fans of the series, arch villain Stuart Nicklin, described as “the most dangerous psychopath [Thorne] has ever put behind bars,” is back for a return engagement. This time, Nicklin is serving as Svengali for Rebecca Driver, a female serial killer who mutilates her victims a la the dictates of the three wise monkeys: see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. For bonus points, she even honors a fourth monkey that is sometimes included in the traditional crew, along with the maxim “Do no evil.” (I will leave the details of Rebecca’s gruesome methodology to your imagination.) Nicklin’s own bad deeds were well chronicled in Thorne’s 12th adventure, The Bones Beneath, and suffice it to say that the intervening years have done nothing to mellow his penchant for brutality. Thorne turns to the ubiquitous British camera surveillance system to bring Rebecca to justice, but as Billingham takes pains to point out, surveillance cameras can be employed with devastating results on either side of the thin blue line. How, exactly? Thorne, and the reader, will soon find out.

This month's cleverest whodunits feature idiosyncratic, complicated gumshoes.
Mystery & SuspenseSuspense

Take No Names

Review by G. Robert Frazier

Daniel Nieh’s Take No Names is a blast from start to finish, a classic crime thriller that shifts into an over-the-top action romp.

Chinese American Victor Li is keeping a low profile in Seattle after being wrongfully accused of killing his father, who secretly worked for a Chinese criminal syndicate (the plot of Nieh’s 2019 debut, Beijing Payback). Drinking buddy Mark Knox recruits Victor to his security tech business for Victor’s computer skills and ability to speak Chinese and Spanish. But it’s not long before Mark enlists Victor in a lucrative side job: breaking into a government storage yard to steal and then sell unclaimed items seized from deported immigrants. It’s on one of these ventures they discover a painite, a rare gem worth a cool $250,000. The pair smuggle the gem to a buyer south of the border, where they are soon embroiled in a scheme by a U.S. military contractor to derail construction of a new Chinese-built airport in Mexico City.

Along the way, the two men form uneasy alliances with Victor’s estranged sister, Jules, and Sun Jianshui, who once worked for the same criminal syndicate as Victor’s father—and was the person who actually killed him. The interactions among all four main characters lead to both humorous and emotionally charged moments as they try to worm their way out of the mess they’ve gotten themselves into. Victor and Mark are particularly likable, a pair of outcasts who have forged a unique and unexpected friendship.

Nieh, who has lived in the United States, China and Mexico, maintains a steady balance of humor, action and thrills, while also making some barbed commentary on American capitalism and Chinese globalization. The twists and turns come often, keeping the intrepid Victor and Mark on their toes as they run for their lives from one chapter to the next. What starts as a Joe R. Lansdale-esque crime thriller morphs halfway into an espionage caper à la Mission Impossible. If it sounds a bit over the top, it is—but that’s what makes Take No Names such an irrepressibly fun read.

Daniel Nieh's Take No Names is a blast from start to finish, a classic crime thriller that shifts into an over-the-top action romp.
Mystery & SuspenseSuspense

The Lies I Tell

Review by Linda M. Castellitto

A decade ago, Kat Roberts was an L.A. Times rookie, part of a team working on a high-profile news story about a predatory high school principal. In hopes of jump-starting her career, Kat decided to conduct her own secret side investigation and wow her new boss with the results. But things went terribly wrong, and to this day, she blames the person who sparked her interest in the side story: a young woman named Meg.

Fifteen years ago, Ron Ashton rendered a teenaged Meg Williams homeless. Her mother fell in love with the successful real estate developer and was grateful when he agreed to help refinance their beloved home. Alas, he lied about the documentation as well as about his intentions; Meg’s mom died not long after, leaving her daughter alone to deal with unresolved grief and sudden housing insecurity. 

But an incandescently angry Meg determinedly clawed her way to solvency one con job at a time, with impeccably thorough research as her secret weapon and terrible men as her favored targets. She’s become very, very good at conning people: As she asserts in the opening pages of Julie Clark’s intricate and engrossing The Lies I Tell, “By the time you’re saying nice to meet you, I’ve already known you for months. Does this worry you? It should.” 

Why Julie Clark refuses to write unreliable female narrators.

In present-day Los Angeles, a Google alert lets Kat know that Meg’s returned to town, right in the middle of Ashton’s run for state senate. A strong researcher herself, Kat has some idea of Meg’s backstory, plus her current false identity as a real estate agent. Kat resolves to use that information to launch a con of her own: She’ll pose as a potential buyer, befriend Meg and twist trust into revenge. Or will she?

It’s an exciting premise, bolstered by intriguingly detailed descriptions of Meg’s various ruses, compelling character growth and lots of slow-building tension via complex manipulation. Clark, author of New York Times bestseller The Last Flight, has yet again crafted a fascinating pair of women who wrestle with trauma, sexism, identity and whether it’s ever okay to do bad things for good reasons.

Julie Clark's intricate and engrossing suspense novel is the story of a con artist, a reporter and whether it's okay to do bad things for good reasons.

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Paul Tremblay

There’s no going back in this apocalyptic home-invasion thriller

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Praised by horrormeister Stephen King, Paul Tremblay’s shocking new novel, The Cabin at the End of the World, is an often graphic account of one family’s ordeal when their vacation is shattered in a cult-like home invasion. We asked Tremblay about the book’s origins, its dark path and his inner fears that helped forge the novel.

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