Noir fans will find plenty to like in The Devil’s Share, the fourth book in Wallace Stroby’s series featuring professional thief Crissa Stone. It’s a classic of the genre and a perfect example of just how badly things can go wrong for anyone, even an obsessive planner like Crissa, who picks up on any tiny deviation from her carefully organized heists.

As for the theft proposed in Devil, what could possibly go wrong? Stone is working with a wealthy art collector named Cota, who plundered Iraqi art treasures from their native country but has agreed to return them in exchange for the promise that he’ll suffer no legal consequences. Now, however, he’s found a secret buyer for the problematic art and hires Crissa to steal the lot back while they’re on their way home—all the better to end up in his hands again.

Crissa asks all the right questions but hasn’t quite planned for Hicks, Cota’s head of security, and his coterie of ex-Marines, who have their own code of conduct, not to mention their own plans as to how this operation should go. She gets blindsided by the ruthlesss Hicks, barely escaping with her life after a confrontation in the Nevada desert. Crissa’s carefully honed competence must kick into high gear as she works to outwit her adversaries before they can eliminate her.

Crissa is poised to join the elite ranks of literary “bad guys” of the caliber created by Elmore Leonard and Donald Westlake (aka Richard Stark), and she doesn’t have a lot of sympathy to waste on folks who try to find her “redeeming” virtues. She is who she is, neither charming nor humorous, but in brief, poignant scenes throughout the book we see glimpses of her troubled, lonely life and the people with whom she clearly possesses a bond of loyalty—a lover/mentor who’s in jail for the long haul; her friend and partner-in-crime, Chase; and her daughter, who has no clue about Crissa—all those whom she loves but cannot ever really reach.

This taut story has no wasted words, and it packs a singular punch.

Most readers probably imagine their favorite author as thoughtful and deep—someone bursting with insight into life and empathy for all creation. From the outside, that’s what Henry Hayden appears to be. Modest despite the five-and-counting bestsellers that bear his name, he seems to be devoted to his wife, loyal to his friends and eager to sign books for the fans who travel to his remote village just to meet him. But he’s a fraud: Every word of his novels was written by his publicity-shy wife, Martha. His role is to take the credit—and enjoy the mansion, Maserati and mistresses that come with fame.

Then Henry’s girlfriend tells him she’s pregnant. Desperate to protect his perfect life, he commits a violent act that turns out to be a huge mistake. Now Martha is missing, and he must prove he’s not to blame. To do so, he’ll have to use his manipulative charms on an entire cast of amoral schemers—including Betty, the mistress who hopes to wed him; Gisbert, the sad-sack ex-schoolmate who can’t forgive Henry’s childhood cruelty; and Obradin, the brooding Serbian best friend who’d do anything in the name of loyalty. As the carnage piles up, the truth about Henry’s past threatens to close in on him.

The Truth and Other Lies is told from Henry’s point of view and incisively presents the mind of a narcissist—a man who can commit murder, yet pat himself on the back for “doing good and feeling good at the same time.” Henry’s cynical worldview provides flashes of mordant humor: Fearing arrest, he takes the scenic route to the morgue because “he wanted to make the most of his last opportunity to drive the Maserati.” And his schemes result in ironic plot complications that rival those of “his” acclaimed thrillers. Henry may lack literary talent, but as a criminal he authors an unfolding catastrophe that readers will relish.

K.T. Medina’s debut novel, White Crocodile, is a harrowing venture into the deadly fields of Cambodia, a Southeast Asian nation of volatile politics, poverty and danger. The author is a former member of the British armed forces, well qualified to describe the conditions in that small country where, in the 1970s, hostile political groups planted thousands of land mines that have victimized the native population to the present day.

After five years of experience in the British Royal Engineers, including three tours of duty clearing mines in Afghanistan, Tess Hardy has joined the humanitarian mine clearance charity MCT in Cambodia’s Battambang Province. Her secret agenda, known only to herself, is to discover what happened to her ex-husband, Luke, who was reported killed while searching out unexploded mines with MCT, but whose body was never recovered. Luke physically abused Tess during their marriage, but drew her back into his orbit during a disturbing phone call to her shortly before his death. Just after Tess arrives in Cambodia, she watches as another of Luke’s colleagues, an experienced mine clearer, is severely injured by a mine. Are these accidents—or murder?

Threading through this unnerving tale is the image of a White Crocodile, carved on doorways and homes and appearing on signposts in the minefields strewn with lethal weapons, fields that the fearsome crocodile appears to stalk on his killing missions. The creature is a symbol of death, connected to an old legend that intimidates the population into near passivity—or violent revenge. The White Crocodile is also blamed for a spate of disappearances and related killings in local villages, always of young single mothers whose deaths leave their small children without home and family. The story clicks at another level as readers learn these events may be related to the murder of a young Cambodian woman, oceans away in England. Tess, in uneasy alliance with Alex, a Croatian mine clearer with violent tendencies of his own, vows to defy the myth of the crocodile’s menace and uncover the mystery behind the disappearances and deaths.

The danger of unexploded mines in the Cambodian fields serves as a frightening symbol of the brutality that victimizes the terrified, closemouthed populace and throws into sharp relief the political agencies sent to aid villagers—groups that often inspire the very forces that victimize.

White Crocodile is an arresting, disturbing and memorable read.

RELATED CONTENT: Go Behind the Book with author K.T. Medina.

Does a spy thriller written by a former CIA officer offer an unbiased view of the world of espionage? Who knows, but it seems the answer may be both yes and no.

Former CIA spook and burgeoning author Jason Matthews has an amazing feel for the insider lingo and relentless intrigue of the spy’s life. Palace of Treason, the second book in his series (following his debut, Red Sparrow), is a harrowing look into the lives of spies, including a CIA rookie named Nate and a gorgeous Russian intelligence operative named Dominika Egorova, who lives the precarious existence of a double agent, spying for the U.S. while maintaining her Russian cover.

On the other hand, this wealth of technical knowledge—and a breathtaking sense that the author’s been out in the field himself—at times produces an overdone, good-guy-bad-guy inflection that can be off-putting. In Matthews’ world, nearly all Russians are self-serving, smug and boorish, while the white hats in the CIA are “smooth and professional . . .  strong and reliable.” In this day and age it’s hard to believe that the double-dealing, crafty self-interest and sadism are so completely one-sided, and this tendency shadows what is an otherwise riveting narrative.

Matthews’ intricate plot follows Dominika the mole as she seeks to undermine and botch Russia’s efforts to encourage Iran’s nuclear enrichment program. She passes critical information to the CIA, always a half step away from discovery—there’s also an enemy mole operating inside the CIA who’s about to unmask and destroy Dominika, and each page brings that agent one move closer to proving her a traitor to Mother Russia.

Nate and Dominika maintain a hot love affair, adding to the tension and possibility that either may make a mission-destroying decision. The book offers up other, stranger bedfellows as well. Palace contains marvelous descriptions of murky, offbeat characters, as well as a disconcerting central role for Vladimir Putin that seems misplaced in this narrative full of otherwise fictional types.

This is stay-up-all-night reading, and we’re pummeled by hair-trigger actions on every page. There’s a striking sense that no one seems to win for long. It’s a world in which victories and setbacks follow each other hard and fast, in a game where both missions and lives are destroyed in an instant.

“I was too angry to take my own life,” muses the protagonist of Sharon Bolton’s Little Black Lies. “Unless, of course, I could take Rachel’s first.” Readers expecting a conventionally likable heroine may be taken aback by Catrin Quinn, a woman too consumed by grief to feel much empathy for anyone around her. Catrin is a wildlife conservation expert in the Falkland Islands, a remote 2,000-person settlement in the south Atlantic. Until three years ago, she was a married mother of two. Then her best friend, Rachel, left her sons unattended in a car by the side of a cliff, allowing them to roll to their deaths.  

The tragedy ended Catrin’s marriage, as well as her affair with sexy ex-soldier Callum Murphy. It also left Catrin bitter, hopeless and preoccupied with revenge. When a visiting tourist’s young son goes missing, joining in the search brings her anguish even closer to the surface. She believes the child simply wandered away from his parent and drowned—but this is the third such disappearance in three years, and islanders are starting to wonder if there could be a killer in their midst. Then Rachel’s son disappears, and Catrin’s neighbors start to wonder if that killer might be her.

Lies evokes the wild landscape of the Falklands—a place where whale and seal sightings are common, wrecked ships lurk just off the coast and abandoned mines from the ’80s-era war still pose a threat. It also deftly portrays the mental states of its three narrators: Catrin; Callum, the ex-lover who still hopes to win her back; and Rachel, the accidental killer who uses pills and alcohol to numb her guilt. Each is deeply damaged and difficult to love, but this fast-paced and expertly plotted thriller forces readers to question whether any of them are capable of murder.

In the chilling opening of Stephen King’s Finders Keepers, a sequel to his 2014 bestseller Mr. Mercedes, three words jolt elderly literary lion John Rothstein from a sound sleep, alerting him to the fact that he’s become the victim of a home invasion: “Wake up, genius.”

But these aren’t just any robbers. They’re led by Rothstein’s biggest (and baddest) fan, small-time criminal Morris Bellamy. Morris is unhappy that Rothstein has gone decades without publishing a new Jimmy Gold book (think John Updike’s Rabbit series), and he definitely doesn’t like that, in the last published novel, nonconformist Gold sold out to climb the corporate ladder at an advertising agency.

Morris kills Rothstein, stealing his money and his stash of notebooks—which, unbeknownst to him, include two more Jimmy Gold novels. But Morris is arrested for a different crime the next day, and the money and the notebooks are left to languish in a hiding place near his childhood home.

Fast-forward 35 years, and teenager Pete Saubers stumbles upon Morris’ treasure. The money comes in handy—Pete’s father is in chronic pain after being injured in the Center City Massacre, and the family is struggling financially due to medical bills and lost income—but the notebooks capture Pete’s imagination. Over the years, he falls in love with literature thanks to the story of Jimmy Gold. But when Morris is released from prison and realizes his hiding place has been discovered, Pete becomes his next target. 

Luckily, police detective Bill Hodges and his sidekicks, college student Jerome and tech-savvy but socially awkward Holly, who starred in Mr. Mercedes, are on the case, thanks to a call from Pete’s little sister, Tina, who’s worried about his strange behavior. 

At least one more novel featuring Hodges and the Center City Massacre victims is in the works. But the new characters shine as well: Pete is a worthy addition to King’s roster of memorable teen characters. He’s smart, brave and fiercely loyal to his family, especially Tina, but doesn’t always have the experience to make the right calls when it counts. Morris, on the other hand, is the sort of cold, calculating villain who will haunt your dreams. He’s spent decades waiting for those notebooks, and nothing is going to keep him from reading them.

King has long been interested in literary obsessions, and the divide between author and fan or creator and creation—think Misery, The Dark Half or Secret Window, Secret Garden. Finders Keepers continues to explore these ideas and adds another dimension: Pete and Morris are both willing to do a lot to hold on to Rothstein’s works. At what point does the hero become the villain? 

Readers will find themselves pondering this question and others at the close of this accomplished thriller.