Much like her previous standalone novel, The Witch Elm, Tana French’s The Searcher meanders its way into a mystery with a deliberate patience. Cal Hooper is an outsider in his rural Irish town, and before he can be ensnared by a missing person case, Cal—and by extension the reader—must get his footing in his new community. It’s this nuance, a signature of French’s writing, that makes this novel more than just a mystery; it’s also an exploration of rural poverty and the closely intertwined lives of people who are just trying to scratch out a living.

Cal is a former Chicago detective burned out from his job, licking his wounds after his divorce and struggling to reconnect with his adult daughter. His decision to move to Ireland and fix up a ramshackle farmhouse feels impulsive, but Cal is almost immediately centered by the beautiful landscape and by the kindness of his neighbors. Gossip gets around through, and soon Cal finds 13-year-old Trey Reddy on his doorstep. Trey’s 19-year-old brother Brendan has vanished and Trey believes that he’s been met with foul play.

The Irish police, and indeed Brendan’s own mother, believe Brendan left of his volition. The Reddys are poor, Brendan didn’t make it into college, and his girlfriend recently broke up with him. With few prospects, it’s reasonable to assume that he fled to Dublin like many teens before him. Trey’s insistence rattles something in Cal, however, and as he begins a quiet investigation into Brendan's disappearance, he realizes that his tiny community is full of secrets and people who don’t want Brendan found. French scrapes away at the idyllic landscape of rural Ireland and reveals the vices that plague every village and town, including drugs like methamphetamine. As the book progresses, Cal’s idyllic country adventure begins to rot around the edges.

What sets The Searcher apart from French’s earlier novels is its depiction of how deeply intertwined the residents of the village are—with young people leaving the area, farms struggling and poverty and drug use plaguing the area, each person is somehow dependent on his or her neighbors for survival. This is not a place where Cal can bury his head in the sand. Evocative and lyrical, The Searcher is a mystery worth reading slowly to savor every perfectly rendered detail.

Cass Neary is hard-up for cash and stranded in London when she hears about a rare book deal and attends the sale out of curiosity. The meeting turns deadly, and she learns that the book may have powers beyond our understanding. In the chaos that follows, Cass explores the resurgent white nationalist movement in Europe and Scandinavia, confronts her own past trauma and relies on her keen photographer’s eye as she searches for truth. The Book of Lamps and Banners is a hair-raising, mind-bending trip.

You can definitely enjoy this book on its own terms, but if at all possible, find and devour the first in the Cass Neary series, Generation Loss. (You’ll have nightmares, but I promise it’s worth it.) Author Elizabeth Hand does not shy away from bleak, unlikable characters, including her protagonist. Cass is strung out on speed and alcohol, so when she starts ranting about an app that turns people into murderers, the people around her justifiably roll their eyes. Quinn, a boyfriend from her days as a photographer in New York’s punk demimonde, enables her destruction but tries to soften its impact.

Past and present keep smashing together, as do reality and the mind-warping effects of the sought-after book. Hand’s language tightens when Cass spies a detail nobody else notices, but we feel the dead weight of her hangovers and the cranked-up jangle of her nerves. It’s unsettling but impossible to look away as elements line up to set a grim climax in motion.

Does this sound impossibly dark? It is! It’s also exquisitely suspenseful, and the paranoia suffusing the story is very much of our present moment. The idea that any single source can make sense of everything happening around us is as alluring as it is dangerous. Half of the mystery in The Book of Lamps and Banners is wondering whether Cass Neary will save us or take us down with her.

Part suspense tale, part Joy Luck Club and part Sophie’s Choice, The Devil of Nanking is a lyrical novel in which secrets foreshadow the undoing of their bearers, and exposure of the secrets offers redemption. History, folklore and ancient taboos are interwoven seamlessly with the modern-day mystery, which begins when Grey, a young Englishwoman, arrives penniless in Tokyo, nursing a major obsession. Grey, of course, is not her real name. She acquired it from a bedmate at a hospital some years before: “I was grey. Thin and white and a little bit see-through. Nothing at all left alive in me. A ghost.” A ghost with an obsession, however: a scholar’s urge to acquire a rare bit of film footage from the 1937 Nanking massacre.

Before the beginning of World War II, the Imperial Japanese Army had invaded China. By winter of 1937, the army had reached Nanking. The atrocities were unspeakable; by some accounts more than 400,000 Chinese were murdered, piled in a mountain of corpses at the city’s edge. More than five decades have passed, but Grey feels that the key to her search lies with Dr. Shi Chongming, a guest lecturer at Todai University in Tokyo, who had been a resident of Nanking at the time of the massacre. In between meetings with the standoffish professor, Grey must find a way to make some quick money, so she accepts a job as a hostess at a trendy Tokyo nightspot. Here she meets an elderly yakuza, a man with a terrible secret. Grey is no stranger to terrible secrets herself, and she is about to uncover yet another with the help of the inscrutable Dr. Chongming.

By way of warning, this is a disturbing book, and there are scenes of graphic (but in no way gratuitous) violence which are necessary to portray such horrific events. By any measure, The Devil of Nanking is a novel that resonates long after the last page has been turned.

The Less Dead by Denise Mina opens with a personal crisis that explodes into a compelling thriller. Glasgow-based physician Margot Dunlop is facing down the chaos in her life: her adopted mother has recently passed, she’s broken up with her boyfriend, her best friend is being stalked and she has just found out she’s pregnant. Trying to make sense of her world, Margot reaches out to the agency that facilitated her adoption to get in touch with her birth mother, only to learn that she was murdered shortly after Margot’s birth.

From here we descend into the dark underbelly of Glasgow. Margot’s mother was a sex worker and heroin addict, her murder left unsolved by a police force that considered her subhuman. Margot meets her aunt Nikki, also a former sex worker and addict, and learns that her mother’s case was far more complex than a trick gone wrong. Nikki believes that her sister was killed by a corrupt cop, and has received threatening letters that provide details only the killer could know. Margot isn’t sure she wants to be involved in the case, but she isn’t given a choice when the killer begins stalking and harassing her as well.

Mina’s novel stands out in a genre that commodifies the dead bodies of women. Her characters are nuanced, complicated and never stereotypes, and her portrayal of the world of sex work isn’t lurid or voyeuristic. Furthermore, Margot is not the middle-class savior some would mistakenly believe that these women need. And although Margot’s mother was a victim of a violent crime, Mina juxtaposes her murder with the stalking of Margot’s best friend, Lilah, showing that women are the subjected to violence by the men in their life at every socioeconomic level.

As Margot seeks justice for her late mother, she’s introduced to a community of women, some still addicts, some still sex workers, who protect and care for one another, even as they are shamed and shunned by society at large. The Less Dead is at once a gripping thriller and an examination, and vindication, of a group of women who are often faceless, unsympathetic victims.

Agent Sayer Altair is finding her feet again after a major loss, and things are getting back to a new, if shaky, normal when she’s called in on a case that makes no sense at all. A teenage girl has been killed, and her body left posed on a Washington, D.C., monument, along with several figurines and a message in blood. When Sayer’s team learns the girl was kidnapped with a busload of classmates on a STEM field trip, it becomes a race against the clock to figure out the mind of this killer and find the other missing kids. Ellison Cooper’s Cut to the Bone is never content with one twist; this book is a high-speed, high-stakes labyrinth of reverses and double crosses.

While reading, you can almost feel Cooper’s delight in the traps she lays. From the outside, Sayer and her colleagues are trying to locate the killer and decipher his reasoning; inside the bus that was hijacked and hidden, the surviving girls use teamwork and tech skills to try and save themselves. But nothing is simple in this story, from the ancient Egyptian rituals being reenacted in the killings to the anonymous person who is following Sayer and intervening at critical points in the case. Sayer is also getting calls from a person who’s the subject of a psychopathy study, and who knows too much about Sayer’s life and work (a subplot that may prove a bit melodramatic for some readers). And the resolution is all-out chaos, a scramble of revelations that make it hard to tell who is truly dead or alive.

Occasional moments of rest, when we learn about the neuroscience behind psychopathic behavior and how it differs from psychosis, are as gripping as the field work and chases, if not more so. The whip-crack pacing and constant sense of being pulled toward multiple leads make for compulsive, blow-through-your-bedtime reading, and if you think it doesn’t end with a bang and a half, think again. Cut to the Bone is a wild ride, creepy while still being a lot of fun.

Set in Ireland and America, Sarah Stewart Taylor’s slowly simmering The Mountains Wild is the first entry in a new series featuring homicide detective Maggie D’arcy. A divorced mother of one living on Long Island, Maggie earned her investigative bona fides by solving a case involving a notorious serial killer that the FBI couldn’t crack.

Maggie originally felt called to become a detective after her cousin, Erin, vanished in the woods of Wicklow, Ireland, in the 1990s. At the age of 23, Maggie traveled there to look for Erin, but neither she nor the Irish police force, the Gardaí, could find her.

Decades later, Maggie remains haunted by her cousin’s disappearance. After Erin’s scarf is found by investigators searching for a woman named Niamh Horrigan, Maggie returns to Ireland—and reenters a maze of painful memories—to do some sleuthing. The authorities fear that a serial killer is at work and that Niamh may be latest his hostage.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Sarah Stewart Taylor reveals the haunting events that inspired her debut novel.

Upon arriving in Dublin, Maggie meets up with her old friend Roly Byrne, a good-natured detective inspector, and becomes a temporary member of his investigative team. Together, they race to connect the pieces of the intricate mystery behind Niamh’s disappearance. The case becomes even more complicated when Maggie gets involved with former flame Connor Kearney, who was friends with Erin and may know more about her disappearance than he let on when he was originally questioned.

Taylor takes her time in unspooling the strands of the mystery, keeping the reader on edge all the while. Through transportive details of Dublin pubs and the Wicklow wilderness and a wonderful command of Irish history, she fashions an immersive setting for the narrative, which moves nimbly through the decades, flashing back to Maggie’s first trip to Ireland and providing glimpses of her friendship with Erin.

Featuring a memorable cast that includes cheeky Irish Gardaí, sinister suspects and a not-to-be-messed-with female lead, The Mountains Wild makes for perfect summer reading. Maggie is a first-class protagonist—an ace investigator and appealing everywoman with smarts and heart. Suspense fans will welcome her to the crime scene.

The Mist is the third and final book in Ragnar Jónasson’s electrifying Hidden Iceland series, which features Hula Hermannsdóttir, detective inspector with the Reykjavik Police Department. Like its predecessors, The Darkness (2018) and The Island (2019), Jónasson’s latest is a labyrinthine murder mystery set against the bleak backdrop of Iceland.

It’s Christmas 1987, and Erla and Einar Einarsson, who run a farm in the highlands—“the edge of the inhabited world”—are preparing for the holiday. In their part of Iceland, winter days don’t begin to brighten until 11 a.m., brutal blizzards are a regular occurrence and skiing is easier than walking or driving. The two receive few visitors and don’t have a television.

In the midst of a pummeling snowstorm, a stranger named Leó shows up at the farm looking for shelter. Leó claims to have become lost during a hunting trip with friends, but Erla doesn’t believe his story. She’s frightened of him from the start, and her fears worsen after the electricity goes out, leaving the farmhouse in darkness. As Erla tries to find out what Leó is after, the novel moves headlong toward a terrifying climax.

Two months later, Hulda, recently returned from personal leave after a tragedy involving her teenage daughter, is asked to look into a pair of murders that occurred at the farm. Although she struggles to keep her emotions in check, Hulda moves into detective mode, bringing her brisk, efficient investigative style to a sinister crime scene. But the circumstances at the farm are more complex than they appear, and Hulda soon discovers that the murders may be linked to the disappearance of a young woman named Unnur.

Jónasson turns the tension up to a nearly unendurable degree as the novel unfolds. His complete—and complex—narrative design isn’t revealed until late in the book, when the story’s multiple threads coalesce in a surprising conclusion. With this no-frills thriller, he continues to map Iceland’s outlying regions and to develop Hulda’s character, adding a new chapter to her story that followers of the series will savor. Masterfully plotted and paced, The Mist is atmospheric, haunting and not for the faint of heart.

The small town of Lovelock, Nevada, is nestled in brush-dotted hills that crouch under unending blue sky—an eerie desert landscape that sets a tone of creeping dread in Heather Young’s The Distant Dead.

Young, an Edgar Award nominee for her first book, 2016’s The Lost Girls, has crafted a story that begins with a horrific discovery and expands to explore the weight of familial obligation, the far-reaching devastation of drug addiction and the ways in which guilt and boredom can curdle into something much more sinister. And so: Sixth-grader Sal Prentiss goes to the fire station to report that he’s found a burned body while, in another part of town, social studies teacher Nora Wheaton is wondering why her colleague Adam Merkel hasn’t shown up to work. He’s a math teacher and it’s Pi Day—surely he wouldn’t miss the opportunity to have math-centric fun with his class? No one else seems very concerned, not least because the enigmatic Adam keeps to himself and doesn’t engage in gossip, but Nora can’t shake the feeling that something’s wrong. Alas, her instincts are validated when she learns that Adam is the victim.

It’s incomprehensible; what enemies could he possibly have? He’s been very kind to Sal, teaching the boy chess at lunchtime and helping him navigate a hard life with his taciturn uncles on an isolated ranch outside of town. Nora’s not confident the relatively inexperienced police will be able to solve the case, and she’s also been feeling unfulfilled, due to a dream deferred: she went to college for anthropology but left early to care for her argumentative alcoholic father. She decides to investigate Adam’s death, and Young shuttles the reader back and forth in time as she unfurls the characters’ relationships and life paths, with all their secrets and hopes and disappointments.

The suspense is slow and steady in this meditative, artistic take on the murder mystery—the author’s language is poetic, and her contemplation of the corrosiveness of suppressed emotion is both sympathetic and impatient: When will people learn? This is an unusual, compelling portrait of a people and a place where the future always seems impossibly far away.