Sarah and Jennifer believed that to be informed was to be prepared, so they became versed in all of the statistics of threatening situations and created a list of things to never do. They strictly followed the list until one night in college when they got in a car with a stranger—a devastating choice that led to five years of unspeakable torture, as Sarah and Jennifer were held captive with two other girls in an unforgiving cellar.

A former victim confronts old fears in this disturbing abduction thriller.

Ten years later, Sarah is trying to live with the realities of what happened, including the loss of her best friend and the fact that her former captor is up for parole in four months. He has been sending letters from jail to the three surviving girls, and Sarah believes that there is more to these letters than the mindless ramblings of a madman. She is determined to find evidence to keep her tormentor in jail and put her own mind to rest.

Following the directions of a maniac and piecing together pieces from the past, Sarah finds herself on a journey that is far removed from the sanctuary she has been hiding in for the last 10 years. Her search is interrupted by flashback chapters, slowly revealing the gruesome nature of Sarah’s years in captivity, and readers will experience the uneasy horrors of Sarah’s past as she works her way through a psychopath’s mind in search of her best friend's body. The fact that the evil man is still in jail slightly dilutes the story’s suspense, but all is not as it appears: Someone is doing his work for him, and Sarah risks getting in the way. Conflicts encountered along the way are quickly resolved, but the constant twists and turns will keep readers guessing until the end.

This story is a twisted tale of a courageous woman trying to make sense of a madman’s mind, but in her darkest moments, Sarah will be surprised by her own strengths and weaknesses. In addition to the terrifying moments, Sarah’s story is one of friendship, trust and the search for truth. For readers looking for a psychological thriller, The Never List will be hard to beat.

Close My Eyes, a new psychological thriller by Sophie McKenzie, poses the question of what happens when a woman loses a child at birth, and eight years later feels no letup in her sense of loss and bereavement. After all this time, a stranger arrives at Geniver Loxley’s door to say that her child was not stillborn, but in fact is very much alive. The stranger claims her sister, a nurse, attended the birth and saw the child alive and well. Still worse, she says that Gen’s husband knew about the deception, too. She’s short on details, but leaves her phone number so Gen can reach her once she absorbs the news.

When Gen’s husband, Art, hears this, he’s irate. He vehemently denies the stranger’s claim and speculates that it’s a horrible scam perpetrated as payback by a disgruntled business rival. He’s adamant against following up, but for Gen, the genie is out of the bottle. Inconsolable loss has turned into a kind of frantic hope, and with or without Art’s help, she decides to pursue the truth. Was her baby stillborn? If not, who was involved in what amounted to a horrific kidnapping? What could be the reason for such an unforgiveable act?

A mother will stop at nothing to discover the truth of her baby's death.

Gen remembers nothing of the birth, as she was deep under anesthesia, and must do her detective work from scratch. She searches through oddly incriminating bank records and newly discovered paperwork, talking with anyone who had a possible connection to the event. As grim and suggestive facts begin to emerge and a suspicious death impedes her efforts, she begins to suspect everyone—even Art. But luckily for Gen, and for the progress of the book, an amiable Irishman named Lorcan enters the action, and the balance of sanity begins to shift.

The book employs all the staples of this genre: a woman on an often lonely quest, fighting the odds as well as questions about her own sanity, and putting herself in danger to uncover the truth about something deeply personal. Is she just a gullible victim, or is there a conspiracy of silence among those nearest to her to shield her from some awful knowledge?

Author McKenzie pulls out all the stops in this tense shocker, including a surprising conclusion and a couple of final pages you won’t want to read in advance! Readers who like twists and page-turning surprises are in for a treat.

Readers, rejoice! All the elements Dan Brown used to such dramatic effect in Angels & Demons, The Da Vinci Code and The Lost Symbol are in full flower in his newest Robert Langdon thriller: impending global chaos and a frantic, day-long chase to avert it, a fanatically resourceful adversary, a beautiful and brainy companion and a pursuit route through some of the world’s most breathtaking architectural monuments. Hovering over the action is a menacing, ill-defined organization blandly called “the Consortium.” The enduring mystery here is why Langdon, who’s always on the run, hasn’t long since traded in his treasured Somerset loafers for a pair of Nikes.

Inferno begins with Langdon waking up in a hospital bed in Florence, Italy, and being told he’s just suffered a bullet wound to the head. Since his last memory is of walking across the campus at Harvard, where he’s a professor of symbology, this news comes as something of a shock. His attending physician introduces herself as Sienna Brooks. But before she can walk him through the events leading up to his present predicament, a spike-haired, black-clad woman assassin invades the hospital, apparently intent on finishing Langdon off. This launches Langdon and Brooks on a flight that will take them through the swankier museums and churches of Florence, Venice and Istanbul before the day is through. Early on, Langdon discovers he’s being chased because he may be able to discover the grand designs of renegade biochemist Bertrand Zobrist, who thinks the only way to save the world from overpopulation is by depopulating it with a plague.

The enduring mystery here is why Langdon, who’s always on the run, hasn’t long since traded in his treasured Somerset loafers for a pair of Nikes.

Even good-hearted Sienna seems swayed by Zobrist’s outlook. “Robert,” she tells him, “speaking from a purely scientific viewpoint—all logic, no heart—I can tell you without a doubt that without some kind of drastic change, the end of our species is coming. And it’s coming fast. It won’t be fire, brimstone, apocalypse, or nuclear war . . . it will be total collapse due to the number of people on the planet. The mathematics is indisputable.” So is Sienna really his friend or foe? Much of the appeal of Brown’s tale comes from never quite knowing where each character’s allegiance lies.

Zobrist, who is dead before Langdon enters the picture, leaves clues to his destructive intent by dropping references to Dante’s multilayered Hell, as described in the “Inferno” section of his Divine Comedy. Like Zobrist, Langdon is a Dante scholar and perhaps the one person who can decipher these clues before the plague is launched. Thus he is caught between the minions of the World Health Organization, which is determined to abort Zobrist’s plans, and those of the Consortium, which is just as resolute in ensuring those plans are carried out.

Although the general tone of the book is apocalyptic, Brown isn’t averse to having some fun at his own expense. At one point, Langdon phones his editor in New York at 4:28 in the morning to plea for the use of a corporate jet. “If you want to write Fifty Shades of Iconography,” his dyspeptic editor grumbles, “we can talk.” But Langdon pushes on, hoping to gain traction by citing his authorial integrity: “Have I ever broken a promise to you?” he persists. “Other than missing your last deadline by three years?” the editor muses peevishly before finally giving in.

Beyond providing readers the excitement of the chase and incidental lessons in art history, Brown also deserves credit for highlighting the very real problem of an increasing population vying for rapidly dwindling resources. Maybe it’s time for Langdon to turn activist.

Edward Morris writes from Nashville, and interviewed Dan Brown before he was famous.