In Dr. Judy Melinek and T.J. Mitchell’s First Cut, medical examiner Dr. Jessie Teska works on the victims of “sudden, violent, and unexpected deaths,” from accidents to suicide to murder. And in Jessie’s first week at her new job, a homicide case launches her life into chaos: A young woman has died from a drug overdose and, it turns out, used to work for one of Jessie’s mercurial new bosses. His reaction makes Jessie wonder if it’s an innocent connection or something darker—but how will she balance a proper investigation with complicated, unfamiliar office politics?

Questions mount and danger rises as Jessie strives to juggle a heavy caseload, leave past hurts behind and figure out whom she can (and cannot) trust. Drug dealers, detectives, lawyers and bitcoin brokers figure into this atmospheric, San Francisco-set tale, which is peppered with humor thanks to Jessie’s wit, as well as Bea the high-spirited beagle and Sparkle the whip-smart bail-bonds lady. Jessie’s forays into dating and romance add sexy fun, and her musings on our collective corporeal vulnerability are by turns humbling (“The cops could drag their feet and stonewall . . . all they want. The body never lies.”) and alarming (à la lists of cases like “jaywalker hit by a bus, a gunshot suicide, a skateboard versus a hydrant, and a stabbing homicide”).

The married authors—whose first book was the bestselling 2014 memoir Working Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner—expertly employ their know-how, maintaining blood-and-guts vérité while empathetically exploring what it’s like to do a job with actual life-and-death stakes. First Cut is a fascinating, entertaining series kickoff, with a particularly kickass heroine.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our Q&A with Judy Melinek and T.J. Mitchell.

A title like Thin Ice immediately connotes danger, and New York Times bestselling author Paige Shelton delivers in every way. A sense of dread persists from the opening page to the novel’s surprising conclusion, with an overall tense mood and an all-too-real terror felt by the book’s protagonist, Beth Rivers.

Beth is also known as Elizabeth Fairchild, the famous penname under which she writes popular thrillers. When we first meet her, Beth is on the run from a violent encounter—a kidnapping by an obsessed fan and a dramatic escape. Her flight takes her to the remote village of Benedict, Alaska, where she hopes to elude her assailant, who is still at large.

Beth’s scars, both internal and external, are real. Internally, she suffers from an overriding fear that even though she has put hundreds of miles between her former and new lives, she may still be in danger. Externally, there is a ragged scar on her head incurred during her escape, serving as a constant reminder of her close brush with death.

Shelton methodically introduces Beth to a wide-ranging cast while swiftly ramping up the tension. It’s not yet winter, but Beth’s Alaskan environment is already harsh, cold and remote. While most of the people she encounters in the village appear to be supportive and caring, she can never quite let go of her suspicions that any one of them could mean her harm—or worse, expose her real identity.

With more memories of her ordeal threatening to return, Beth takes on a new role as the community newspaper’s only reporter and thrusts herself into an ongoing investigation of a local death. New secrets and questions abound, leaving Beth to wonder if she has escaped one threat only to have fallen into another.

Thin Ice is the first in a series from Shelton, who is best known for her Scottish Bookshop Mystery cozy series. But there is nothing cozy here, only danger.

Set in a small town obsessed with the occult, Trace of Evil by Alice Blanchard launches a promising new series and delivers an airtight police procedural with deeply macabre elements. This is a read-in-one-sitting book that will refresh readers who are potentially burned out on the genre.

With a Salem-esque history of killing suspected witches, the spooky little town of Burning Lake, New York, has turned its link to the dark arts into a tourist attraction. When a high school teacher is stabbed to death, homicide detective Natalie Lockhart turns her attention to a disaffected student who might have ties to a coven of teen witches. As if that’s not enough to keep her busy, Natalie is also working on a cold case of nine Burning Lake residents who went missing over the years, with only strange graffiti and creepy fetishes made of dead birds left behind.

While Trace of Evil utilizes paranormal themes like witchcraft, it remains firmly grounded in reality, never crossing the line into a supernatural thriller. What we get instead is a procedural that expertly balances three mysteries at one time with tight plotting and enough clues and red herrings to keep the most experienced of mystery readers conjuring up theory after theory. And truly, Blanchard doesn’t need to utilize the supernatural to make her novel chilling. From the deeply disturbing aspects of the nine disappearances to the teenage obsession with witchcraft (I remember my own love of The Craft at a similar age), the terror here is tied to people who feel so detached from the world around them that they normalize horrifying violence.

Adding to the perfectly executed mysteries and the real-world terror is Blanchard’s careful world building. This is the first book starring Natalie Lockhart, but she appears on the page like a friend readers have known forever. She is the lens through which we view her small town, and she adds an element of empathy to characters who might otherwise feel unsympathetic to the reader. Then there’s the frisson of forbidden sexual tension between Natalie and her boss, a subplot that promises to unwind later in the series. It may seem like a lot to balance within one novel, but Trace of Evil delivers all of these elements without a single misstep.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our Q&A with Alice Blanchard about Trace of Evil.

Many of you will be familiar with Wyoming sheriff Walt Longmire via television rather than books, but as is often the case, the books have nuance and detail that are difficult to replicate on screen. In Craig Johnson’s latest Longmire novel, Land of Wolves, the stalwart lawman is back in Wyoming after a south-of-the-border hunting expedition. In the nearby Bighorn Mountains, a wolf has apparently killed a sheep, which doesn’t seem especially unusual in the Wild West. However, tensions ratchet up considerably when the shepherd is found hanged, his dangling feet savaged by a wild animal, most likely the aforementioned wolf. Johnson uses this as a jumping-off point for broad-ranging discussions about wolves, the history of sheep ranching, the use of open rangelands and other social and ecological issues of the contemporary West. But there is no hint of a textbook in Johnson’s voice. Instead, it’s rather like hearing a modern Old West story told by a favorite uncle, one who fills in the little details that bring immediacy and life to a suspenseful narrative.

Although Archer Mayor’s latest novel, Bomber’s Moon, is considered part of the Joe Gunther series, Gunther himself plays a comparatively minor role. The serious investigative work is left to two of the Vermont-based cop’s well-regarded acquaintances: private investigator Sally Kravitz and photographer/reporter Rachel Reiling. The crime is most unusual. A thief has been breaking into the homes of people who are away but stealing nothing. Instead, he adds spyware to his victims’ communication devices and then waits to see how he can profit from it. But he is not the first person to pursue such an endeavor in this small Vermont town. Kravitz’s own father followed a similar path back in the day (and perhaps still does). He is well aware of this new interloper into the “family trade” and displays more than a little admiration for his successor’s skills—until the new guy gets murdered. The leads, scant though they are, seem to center on a high-priced private school, and before things resolve, there will be significant financial improprieties, more than a bit of class warfare and an increasing body count. The nicely paced Bomber’s Moon is replete with well-developed characters and relationships, with the unusual bonus of oddly likable villains.

Attica Locke’s atmospheric thriller Heaven, My Home takes place in the northeastern Texas town of Jefferson, a once-prosperous trading center fallen on hard times (“the city square was like a courtesan who’d found Jesus”). Texas Ranger Darren Matthews investigates the disappearance of a 9-year-old boy who didn’t return from a solo boating adventure on nearby Caddo Lake. The missing boy is the son of Aryan Brotherhood leader Bill King, a convicted and incarcerated murderer. Jefferson was one of the first settlements composed primarily of freed slaves, in addition to a band of Native Americans who successfully dodged the wholesale relocation of tribes to Oklahoma during the U.S. westward expansion. The town is now home to their descendants. Add those aforementioned white supremacists into the mix, and the town becomes a veritable powder keg awaiting a spark—such as a black land­owner whose animosity toward his bigoted tenants is well documented, and who is the last person to have seen the missing boy. Few suspense novelists display a better grip of political and racial divides than Attica Locke, and she spins a hell of a good story as well, introducing characters and locales you will want to visit again and again.

Readers yearning for a noir mystery in the vein of Mike Hammer or Sam Spade are in luck. Peter Colt has delivered just such a tale of intrigue with his debut novel, The Off-Islander.

Set in 1982, the book features all the classic tropes of noir: a lonely detective on a missing persons case, shady suspects and red herrings, sultry ladies to entice him, rainy streets and seedy bars, danger lurking at nearly every turn. The detective, Andy Roark, even totes around a copy of The Raymond Chandler Omnibus for when he needs moments of inspiration. What more could you ask for?

Colt, an Army veteran who served in Kosovo and Iraq and now is a police officer in a small New England city, captures his firsthand, on-the-job experience in moody prose. The novel spends nearly as much time exploring Roark’s inner demons from the Vietnam War and life afterward as it does with the case at hand, adding a deeply evocative perspective to events.

Approached by longtime friend and lawyer Danny Sullivan, Roark is tasked with finding the long-missing father of a California woman whose husband is seeking political office. He follows the cold case trail to Cape Cod and Nantucket Island, where the man once lived as part of a hippie commune in the late 1960s and received his VA checks in the mail.

It doesn’t take long before Roark’s probing questions about the island’s reclusive residents begin to uncover some unsavory details, all with dangerous repercussions. In typical gumshoe fashion, Roark is pushed over a bluff, his car is vandalized, and he’s shot at by a lurking sniper. Before long, even his friend Danny, who got him into the mess in the first place, is begging him to let things lie.

Of course, no respectable private dick would ever do such a thing, and neither does Roark. If you’re a fan of such fiction, you’ll want to see things through to the end, too.

It’s evident from the first page of Clear My Name that Paula Daly’s heroine, investigator Tess Gilroy, is as adept at keeping secrets as she is at uncovering them. Between Tess and Carrie, the woman she’s trying to prove innocent of murder, we’re left with two narrators who are simultaneously sympathetic and also inherently unreliable. Add exquisite pacing and a plot with some real twists, and you have a recipe for a book bound to keep you up all night.

A former probation officer, Tess is now the chief investigator for a group called Innocence UK that works to free the wrongfully convicted. Her latest case brings her back home to the small town she fled. She’s investigating the murder conviction of Carrie Kamara, a woman serving a 15-year sentence for killing her husband’s mistress. Many of the details surrounding Carrie’s case seem weak and the police work potentially shoddy, but Carrie was never able to account for how her blood was found in the victim’s home. That forensic detail was enough to see her incarcerated.

Even as Tess digs into Carrie’s deeply troubled marriage and her complicated relationship with her daughter, we can sense her unease at being back home. Tess thinks she’s being followed, and she’s avoiding contact with someone from her past. The competing mysteries of Tess’ past and Carrie’s true involvement in the murder make Clear My Name feel tightly wound, with threads of paranoia woven throughout. Tess is used to false claims of innocence, and even as she is reluctant to believe Carrie, we know we also cannot trust Tess.

Eventually Tess’ and Carrie’s narratives collide in a way that is genuinely shocking. The last quarter of this mystery doesn’t so much as unfold as it explodes; the tension is at a fever pitch and the final revelations are genuinely surprising.

With a wonderfully executed mystery and two unreliable narrators, Clear My Name straddles the line between psychological thriller and good old-fashioned whodunit.