The Killer Next Door is the second thriller by Alex Marwood (aka Brit novelist Serena Mackesy), whose first novel, The Wicked Girls (2013), won an Edgar for Best Paperback Original.

Marwood’s descriptions of 23 Beulah Grove, a seedy apartment building in South London, make you want to turn your head away and run somewhere else—fast. Who could live in this moldy, dirty, depressing place, where closed doors and secrets are the norm—especially considering the equally moldy, dirty, lecherous landlord, who raises the rent at will?

Fact is, the six people who live here don’t want their names on any lease that could trace them, so they’re stuck. They’re all running from something, all enclosed in their individual bubbles of solitude as they try to hold onto their hard-won anonymity. We get to know each one: Cher, the abused runaway; Gerard, a divorced former teacher; Thomas, a loner with a hidden core of take-charge authority; Collette, a runaway hiding from a dangerous man who wants her dead; Hossein, a refugee from Iran; and Vesta, a prisoner in her own claustrophobic life.

There are horrific crimes being committed under the roof of 23 Beulah, but only the perpetrator knows about them. These terrible deeds might have remained secret, if not for a series of “accidents” that finally, if reluctantly, bring the tenants together in a slowly developing alliance of trust that begins to open their doors to one another. The criminal and the crimes will certainly garner readers’ attention, but the real story lies between each of the six tenants and their fat, secretive landlord. Marwood realistically portrays the series of seemingly random events that slowly bring the main characters out of their shells and into a shared world.

Each character’s plight is woven into that of his or her fellow travelers, and the storyline succeeds as readers get to know the foibles and strengths of each one, depicted in a natural and unforced way, without the fake dramatic flourishes that often diminish a story of this kind.

The author heaps on a lot of unnecessary gruesome detail in several chapters describing the criminal’s mad, demonic and deadly labors. The story would have fared better with fewer of these scenes, which seem inserted just to titillate our horror taste buds.

The Killer Next Door is more than a horror fest and stands on its own as a drama of people struggling with their very real inner demons.

This fast-paced and gripping novel is part thriller, part crime story, part mystery. It tells the story of Bobby Drake, a deputy sheriff in a small Pacific Northwest town trying to outlive the sins of his larger-than-life father, Patrick. He is doing a good job of it, until his father is let out of prison and the cycle of crime and violence begins again—threatening the peaceful existence Bobby has created.

The appearance of a wolf in the mountains, the first sighted in many decades, provides a metaphoric subplot to the main story. Bobby is tasked with tracking and protecting the wolf—one of the more benign of the many predators in the story, a category that includes Bobby’s father.

The story is told smoothly, blending sweet domestic scenes with fast action, violence, kidnapping and murder, all against the backdrop of the Cascade Mountains, which are lovingly described by author Urban Waite. The characters are realistically drawn— the good guys (especially the DEA agent and the sheriff) heavily flawed, and the bad guys very bad. But what makes Sometimes the Wolf tick is the strained but loving relationship between father and son. The plot is tight, and the action fast. It is easy to read, but hard to put down. You just might lose some sleep over this one.

This article was originally published in the November 2014 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

If ever a book were tailor-made for a David Fincher movie adaptation (Se7en, Zodiac, etc.), it’s Lauren Beukes’ latest dark, genre-bending mystery.

On a cool November night in Detroit, Detective Gabriella Versado comes across the strangest crime scene of her career: a dead 11-year-old boy whose lower half has been replaced by that of a deer. Their bodies have been fused together into a macabre human-animal hybrid straight out of “True Detective” or NBC’s “Hannibal,” and Versado believes the killer will strike again.

Meanwhile, a diverse array of Detroit grifters—the unemployed writer, Jonno Haim, desperate for a story that will save his career; the homeless squatter known as TK, wracked by seizures; and the tortured artist, Clayton Broom, whose refrigerator is stuffed with secrets—begins to encounter strange things in the city at night, “when the borders are the most porous the between the worlds, and unnatural things leak out of people’s heads.” From faces carved into stone cairns at the city’s secret beach to perfect circles of upturned chairs in church basements, something is happening in Detroit beyond the city’s usual death and decay.

This is a police procedural that’s anything but procedural, a deft combination of otherworldly genre intrigue and the true-to-life details of a front-page homicide investigation. In short chapters that are brisk but never rushed, Beukes’ prose is a masterful display of James Wood’s free indirect style, embodying five distinct personalities touched by obsession, desperation and madness. Striking details—like “Detroit diamonds,” what locals call the blue glass left behind from broken car windows—lend an extraordinary sense of place to a story set in one of America’s darkest and most iconic cities. For many writers, reading Beukes is a sobering encounter with our own limitations, awed as we are by her immense talent and unwavering authority with words. To call Broken Monsters her masterpiece would be a disservice to both her previous and future work, but to count it among the very best books of its kind seems perfectly reasonable.