Getting or becoming a new roommate is a spin on the lottery wheel of life. Sometimes you hit the jackpot, and sometimes you lose everything. Quinn Collins can’t believe how lucky she is to have Esther as her roommate. Sure, one time Esther became practically feral when Quinn borrowed her spices without asking. And if she’s a bit bossy, it’s only because she has Quinn’s best interests at heart, right?

Until the night Esther disappears, Quinn thinks she’s just a wonderful person and even fondly calls her Saint Esther. However, as Quinn searches for clues to Esther's unexplained departure, she uncovers disturbing facts that make her rethink all her previous impressions of Esther. Not content to idly wait the police-recommended 72 hours before searching for a missing person, Quinn scours Esther's room, only to find an ominous letter signed by EV, her roommate’s initials. The note is a love letter of sorts to a mystery person, but includes stalker-like content. Quinn also discovers that Esther advertised for a new roommate—a replacement for her. Saddened, she enlists the aid of a mutual friend to help her solve the mysteries surrounding Esther's disappearance and the facts behind the letter.

Another plotline develops when a strange young woman arrives in a town about an hour away from the girls’ apartment. Told by an adolescent obsessed with the new arrival, readers assume the girl must be Esther—or is she?

In her third novel, Don’t You Cry, Mary Kubica follows a trajectory of warmth, suspense and fear. Her skill as an author is apparent in this novel that successfully aligns opposing attributes and astonishes readers with multilayered intrigue. Readers take a sinister tour of family and personal dynamics in this tortuous, well-tempered novel of suspense.

You won’t want to close the book on this one. The new thriller by Michael Robotham, Close Your Eyes, is reason to stay up late.

Clinical psychologist Joseph O’Laughlin is reluctant to once again take on the role of detective—after seven previous adventures, he thought he’d given it up to live out a peaceful retirement—but when a former student, Milo Coleman, calling himself “the Mindhunter,” begins to jeopardize the police investigation, he can no longer stand by idly. With his reputation in danger, Joe sets out to smooth over the ruffled feathers of the police and to calm a groundswell of public anger over the brutal unsolved murders of a mother and her teenage daughter.

Joe soon discovers why police are having such a difficult time as a bevy of suspects, each with possible motives and opportunity, present themselves in the case. The further his investigation carries him, the more dark secrets and potential victims of a ruthless criminal come to light, giving rise to a possible serial murderer in the town’s midst.

The mystery and suspense is reason enough to keep reading, but Robotham ups the ante with a rousing family drama that adds an emotional complication to his lead’s life. Joe, who already must deal with his own bout of Parkinson’s disease, learns his former wife has cancer and must undergo surgery, leaving him to care for his two young daughters. Perhaps unwisely, he even takes his eldest daughter, teenager Charlie, under his wing while investigating the murders.

Robotham drafts brilliantly descriptive passages that paint vivid scenes and sweep readers along in the narrative. It’s easy to sympathize with Joe both in the course of his investigation, and more importantly, in his family life.

The entire novel comes cascading down to a thrilling climax and reveal of the true villain in typical Robotham fashion.

Words can hurt, and in the case of Owen Laukkanen’s compelling, thought-provoking new thriller, The Watcher in the Wall, they can be enough to kill.

Laukkenen’s recurring FBI agents Kirk Stevens and Carla Windermere pursue an Internet troll who encourages fragile teenagers to commit suicide, while recording their final moments via webcam for a black market on the dark web. The case takes on a deeper meaning for Windermere, who continues to berate herself over a past mistake in which she stood by as a fellow classmate was bullied in school to the point she one day never came back. Catching the predator in this case serves as a chance, however slight, for redemption. Interestingly, in the acknowledgements, Laukkanen admits he also dealt with depression and suicidal thoughts as a teenager, making the book even more deeply personal.

Laukkenen’s fast-paced prose and short chapters pull readers along on a cross-country pursuit to identify the predator behind the online suicide forum and stop him before he can rack up more victims. They encounter numerous technological roadblocks along the way and must rely on help from the FBI’s crack technology team to penetrate the suspect’s cybertrail.

Laukkenen based the novel in part on the real-life case of William Melchert-Dinkel, a Minnesota man whose online “encouragement” drove an Ottawa teen to commit suicide in 2009, and who is suspected of entering into fake suicide pacts with at least five other victims. If parents were afraid of whom their impressionable kids are socializing with online before, they will only be more wary after reading this eerily timely and poignant book.

Readers of Laukkanen’s earlier novels in the FBI series, including The Professionals and The Stolen Ones, need not worry that the case is a mask for social commentary, however. It’s a true page-turner up to the final act, which quickly escalates into a fiery exchange of gunfire and action-packed pursuit of the perp.

The Singing Bone, the debut spine-chiller from Beth Hahn, is a concoction of sophistication and surprise. The book takes readers into the heart of the charismatic and sinister Jack Wyck and his cult-like coterie of young followers, presenting an unsparing look at the unsettling power of its manipulative leader. 

In the 1970s, a small group of teens fall under Wyck’s spell, and chapters alternate between the young people as we first meet them and some of those same characters 20 years later, after the terrible deeds have long been done. While flashbacks in fiction can often seem superficial or confusing, Hahn has used the technique here with great success, as the cumulative effect of the years becomes clear in her extraordinary telling. As the chilling Wyck holds the group in thrall, little by little readers come to understand the tragic extent of his mesmerizing influence and ability to shape the young minds he holds in an unrelenting grip.

Sometimes hard to read but always riveting in detail and nuance, The Singing Bone begins with 17-year-old Alice Pearson as she falls under Wyck’s spell along with friends Molly, Stover and Trina. They join Wyck’s bizarre household, one that already includes a wily young man named Lee and an enigmatic woman named Allegra—who may be either a victim or an accomplice. They appear to aid Wyck as he unrolls schemes to defraud innocent families whose soldier sons are missing in the Vietnam conflict.

The early years center on issues within the group, as members of the “household” vie for Wyck’s affections and a prime place, literally, in his bed. Horrific evidence begins to surface that Wyck’s deceptions and trickery have been used many times before, with similar tragic consequences. Years later, Wyck’s surviving victims struggle to gain a semblance of normality in their lives, while Wyck sits in prison awaiting parole, still exerting an uncanny ability to control from behind bars.

Near the end, a researcher looking into the past events imagines one person who might “leave the house, abandon Jack Wyck, return to his own life—but he knows that magic doesn’t exist. The images of freedom won’t save the boy.” Hahn’s prose, simple and never overdone, underlines the dramatic and lasting consequences of all that was surrendered.

BookPage Fiction Top Pick, March 2016

On a bleak, harsh winter afternoon in Chosen, a small town in upstate New York, local art history professor George Clare comes home to find his 3-year-old daughter, Franny, hiding in fear and his wife, Catherine, murdered. George becomes the chief suspect, and the investigation turns up details about his personal life—secret relationships, temper issues, a disintegrating marriage—that cast his innocence in doubt for everyone but his closest family. Still, the police investigating remain unable to pin his wife’s murder on George, and the crime goes unsolved for decades.

Death seems to hang over Chosen; the town is rural, close-knit and poor, with a dark history—the Clares’ own house was the site of a suicide not long before the family moved in. The community struggles not only to understand who killed Catherine, but also how and why. Years will pass—and Franny Clare will have to return to her childhood home, now long abandoned—before any justice is found.

In her third novel, Elizabeth Brundage, who has an MFA from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, combines a classic murder mystery with a gripping psychological thriller, exploring the complexities of grief, relationships—romantic, familial and friendly—and small-town life. All Things Cease to Appear is a smart, original take on the mystery genre, with nuanced depictions of rural New York, the people who inhabit it and the secrets they keep.

This article was originally published in the March 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.