M.P. Cooley’s first novel Ice Shear is a solid, convincing mystery set in the snowy shadows of Hopewell Falls, New York. The story follows June Lyons, a former FBI agent who traded her big badge for the life of a small-town police officer to care for her sick husband, who has since passed. In an attempt to spend more time with her daughter and to fall in better with the police force, she volunteers for the graveyard shift. Her nights pass with no more excitement than driving drunks home and buying doughnuts for the morning shift.

The dear old town of Hopewell Falls is similar to Mayberry, until one night June finds a body of a celebrated congresswoman’s daughter impaled on icy shears that web the bottom of a frozen waterfall. The damage to the body indicates the girl died before the fall, but it’s only after another bloody body connected to the victim turns up that the case escalates into the murder mystery of the century and exposes the corrupt underbelly of a town laced with meth.

This pleasurable police procedural takes a while to pick up and does a fair job of telling Lyons’ side story as the main plotline progresses. Be patient, though—it’s worth the wait, as the story’s originality keeps readers engaged. When do you ever have a perilous biker gang showdown against a congresswoman who is in line for the vice presidency? Perhaps a trained mystery reader can see through the whodunit veil, but Cooley does an excellent job of taking readers through enough twists and turns that you’ll likely be guessing until the very end.

For crime aficionados, New York Times best-selling author Marcia Muller is always a welcome name, one to rely on when you want a sure thing—a book that captures the imagination and might even make you wish you’d cancelled your evening plans so you could just go on reading. Her latest, The Night Searchers—to be exact, number 31 in her San Francisco-based Sharon McCone series—promises to be that kind of book.

Muller is quick out of the gate with a catchy plot hook: A weird couple seeks help from PI McCone’s detective agency because the wife is “seeing things.” As husband Jay rolls his eyes and pats her shoulder, wife Camilla describes witnessing devil worshippers operating from the basement hole of a city excavation, possibly conducting a human sacrifice. The canny, pragmatic McCone intuits that something more than mental instability is at work here, and sure enough, the unlikely scenario soon begins to tie into an investigation underway by RI International, the firm run by McCone’s husband, Hy, a high-level hostage negotiator. McCone and Hy discover a non-Satanic connection between Camilla’s sighting and the titular Searchers, a shadowy bunch of treasure hunters prowling the ’Frisco streets, and with the kidnapping of the director of a political policy forum.

Hy and McCone dispatch researchers and operatives from their companies to connect the dots and discover what, besides treasure, the mysterious Searchers may be hunting, and how it may tie in with kidnappings and devilish conclaves. McCone becomes the suspect in a supposed murder attempt and hides out for a while in a safe house aptly called Cockroach Haven while directing the investigation. The story sports Muller’s usual mix of eccentric characters, not least the Searchers themselves, all with fake names containing the letter “Z.”

The McCone and RI agencies seem to have the power to do almost anything, from calling up the troops to calling off the troops, and the action never stalls. But this time around, Muller’s narrative has a choppy feel to it, jumping from one thing to another and occasionally losing its focus and our attention. The couple’s too-spiffy upscale lifestyle has also become a bit wearing, and readers will miss the old days when McCone operated out of the All Souls Legal Co-op and scavenged around for her daily bread. We are amply compensated, however, by the captivating tour of San Francisco sights and sounds that’s woven throughout the book.

Chicago is infamous for its violence, from Prohibition-era mobsters to modern-day street gangs. As a result, novels set in Chicago often fall somewhere on the spectrum of crime fiction. Lori Rader-Day’s blood-tingling debut—a mystery so chock-full of suspense it’s best devoured in a single late-night reading session—imagines a different brand of violence in Chicago, a phenomenon that’s become all too familiar in the 21st century: school shootings.

Ten months ago, Rothbert University professor Amelia Emmet was shot in the gut by a male student she’d never met. Unfortunately, no one believes Amelia’s side of the story. She’s young, attractive and popular with students, so Chicago news media—as well as Amelia’s friends and colleagues—don’t understand why a complete stranger would shoot her before turning the gun on himself. “I don’t know what they all thought—that I baited a troubled kid, drove him insane with sex or quid pro quo grading practices, and then suffered the only outcome that made any sense? Got what I deserved? Asked for it? That was a phrase I’d come across more than once in the comments section of the student newspaper’s website.”

But if anyone can solve the mystery of her attempted murder, it’s Amelia. She’s a sociology professor who specializes in violence. With the help of painkillers and a walking cane, Amelia returns to Rothbert University, where she meets an earnest young graduate assistant named Nathaniel Barber who’s obsessed with the history of Chicago’s criminal underworld. There’s just one problem: He’s a little obsessed with Amelia, too. Together, they discover Amelia’s role in Rothbert’s shrouded pattern of death.

Rader-Day’s addictive prose is atmospheric and laced with dread. Rothbert’s lakeshore campus in the shadow of Chicago drips with dark secrets, and as in all good mysteries, every character is enigmatic and fascinating.

A perfect thriller for the summer, The Black Hour transcends the tropes and formulas of the mystery genre while deftly portraying academia and the city of Chicago as characters in their own right.