What if someone you loved died and left you a letter plus a few important items? And the letter turned out to be a to-do list for vengeance? And those things were not mementos, but rather a gun, a counterfeit passport and some cash?

In Beijing Payback, California college student Victor Li and his sister, Jules, are stunned when their father, Vincent, a beloved owner of three Chinese restaurants, is murdered. In short order, they discover the aforementioned bizarre and alarming contents of their father’s safe, and a mysterious man named Sun—who knows all about their dad, though they had no idea Sun existed—shows up, ready to assist Victor in going to China to exact revenge on Vincent’s behalf.

It’s a dangerous, quite possibly fatal undertaking (for one thing, Victor’s a college athlete, not an assassin), but he ultimately decides to fulfill his dad’s wishes for one reason: Their comfortable life in suburban America wasn’t due solely to proceeds from the restaurants but from profits earned by the global crime syndicate his father and a few friends founded in post-Mao China.

This is not a typical realizing-your-parents-are-flawed story, to be sure, and debut author Daniel Nieh really goes for it, packing in action, suspense, drama, plus some humor and sexiness, too. The author’s background in Chinese-English translation serves him well, as skillfully employed language throughout evokes Victor’s ties to his Chinese heritage and reinforces his ability to move between cultures as he tries on various personas: basketball player, suave dude, loyal friend, family member . . . and righteous badass?

Drunken college parties give way to terrifying, blood-spattered encounters as the stakes grow ever higher, and Victor must reckon with the truth about his family’s past and its implications for his future in this entertaining, colorful debut.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our Q&A with Daniel Nieh about Beijing Payback.

Halfway through Natalie Daniels’ novel of grief, middle-age regret, betrayal and acid—specifically, acidic British wit—something happens that the reader can scarcely believe. Connie, the protagonist, overhears something. At first you don’t know whether she’s meant to hear it, she’s hearing it by accident or if it’s a bit of both. Whatever the cause of the inadvertent eavesdropping, what Connie learns is shocking. And it leads to a lot of bad craziness.

Daniels teases out Connie’s story bit by bit. At first, we see this humorsome and perceptive lady in a London playground with her preschool-age daughter. There, Connie meets Ness, the mother of another preschooler. The mums and their daughters quickly become the best of chums. Next thing we know, Connie—burned, battered, sliced up—is in an institution. We don’t even need to be told that one of the reasons for her predicament is Ness.

Connie isn’t the only troubled female in this novel. Her psychiatrist is Emma Robinson, whose own problems cause her to identify with her patient a bit more than she should. What happened to Emma is much too close to what almost happened to Connie. Indeed, just about all the women and girls in Daniels’ tale have something at least a little wrong with them. Connie’s daughter is strange, her mother has Alzheimer’s, and Ness seems to be at the whim of her premenopausal hormones. (The reader shouldn’t wonder why her name rhymes with “mess.”) Connie’s fellow inmate, whom she calls Mental Sita, likes to pretend she’s a dog. All the while, fathers, sons and husbands are either absent or just sort of stand around and go about their manly business. Is it the patriarchy that’s making these women sick and crazy and leaving their men so disconnected? Why don’t we need to be told that Ness is part of the reason Connie went mad? Is this how it must be? Must women’s relationships with each other always end up toxic, tormented, even deadly?

Maybe there is healing at the end, but clever, heart-shattering Too Close reminds you of the minefields you have to crawl through to get to it.

Fans of Paula Hawkins will be thrilled by Allison Dickson’s The Other Mrs. Miller. Phoebe Miller is starting to believe her best years are behind her. Heiress to a fortune left by her philandering late father, she passes the days in a haze of alcohol. Arguments with her husband, Wyatt, add to her feelings of discontent. But her life takes an unexpected turn after the Napiers move in across the street. Ron, a doctor; Vicki, his wife; and Jake, their attractive and flirtatious teenage son, appear to be a model family. Vicki is eager to be friends, but Phoebe doesn’t quite trust her. She also suspects she’s being watched by the driver of a car that keeps returning to the neighborhood. When Phoebe receives a series of frightening notes that may have some connection to her father, she begins to fear for her life. With an impossible-to-predict plot and a very unexpected murder, Dickson’s book is required reading for suspense addicts.