There are shades of Jeffery Deaver’s Lincoln Rhyme in quadriplegic forensics consultant Lucas Page, protagonist of Robert Pobi’s standout thriller City of Windows. Page is not quite as physically challenged as Rhyme, but as a result of a shooting some 10 years ago, he is burdened with the loss of an arm and a leg, as well as the loss of sight in one eye. Once a crack FBI field agent, Page has retreated into an academic life. And then something rattles his peaceful post-FBI existence: the assassination of his former partner by a sniper’s bullet, a seemingly impossible shot fired from a rooftop during a blinding snowstorm. Page reluctantly agrees to come out of retirement to help with the investigation of the shooting. His almost three-dimensional grasp of velocities and trajectories borders on the uncanny, and he is thus uniquely suited to the task at hand. Unfortunately, the shooting is only the first in a series of virtually impossible sniper shots targeting a member of the law enforcement community. The tension ratchets up for the reader just as it does for Page as he and his loved ones find themselves in the crosshairs. Pobi has written five other books, but this is his first thriller. It would seem he has found his calling.

Inspector Konrad Sejer returns in Norwegian author Karin Fossum’s stark and oh-so-dark The Whisperer. The titular whisperer is Ragna Riegel, whose vocal cords were damaged in a botched operation, rendering her unable to speak in anything but the most hushed of tones. The surgery is just one in a series of unhappy life events that have left Ragna something of a recluse, her day-to-day existence repetitive and boring—that is, until she receives an anonymous and succinct death threat: “You are going to die.” At first, the police are somewhat lackadaisical in their response, treating the incident as little more than a prank. But as follow-up messages arrive, Sejer finds sufficient cause to launch an investigation, if not for the reasons Ragna might have preferred—he is suspicious that Ragna is in fact the perpetrator of a crime, and not a victim at all. Sympathetic by nature, Sejer nonetheless chips away at Ragna’s facade in the hope of exposing her crime, all the while finding himself moved by the loneliness and grief of her life. Fossum excels at this sort of psychological suspense, and as such, she is one of the leading lights of the Scandinavian whodunit genre. 

The second book in the Special Agent Sayer Altair series delves deep into the mind of a monster, creating an immersive and chilling experience while following a FBI neuroscientist who studies serial killers.

Following up directly where Caged left off, Buried finds Sayer recovering from a gunshot wound—and facing political fallout from her last case in which she exposed a horrible secret within the FBI. Then the gruesome discovery of a mass gravesite in the Shenandoah National Forest pulls Sayer off desk duty and back into the field, but with extremely limited resources. With only a few park rangers and two FBI agents to assist her, Sayer throws herself into the case as a way to avoid coping with her recent trauma.

The bones, and one recent body, tell a macabre story: A serial killer was active in the area for eight years until 2002, only to begin killing again now. Even more troubling is the report of a missing woman whose description matches the profile of the other victims.

As the case begins to build steam, Sayer is drawn into an increasingly dark and melodramatic gothic nightmare. The landscape of the Shenandoah National Forest, with its hidden mines and cave systems, becomes a character itself, as the villain emerges from the shadows to terrorize Sayer’s team, only to vanish again. Small-town secrets and long-held feuds also threaten to derail the investigation. Cooper’s focus on atmosphere gives the novel the tight pacing of a thriller, while also producing a constant feeling of unease more typically found in the horror genre. This is not the book for a cozy mystery fan.

Sayer stands out in a largely whitewashed genre as a woman of color, and her awareness of how her race affects others’ perceptions of her is present but never overly evangelized to the reader. Resourceful and self-possessed, she triumphs even when the odds are stacked against her. When evidence leads her to theorize that a woman who went missing from the area years ago—and who happens to be the local police chief’s sister—may be involved in the killings, she finds herself frozen out by both the FBI and local law enforcement.

By depriving Sayer of departmental resources and deus ex machina forensic breakthroughs, the narrative focuses on her brilliant profiling and detective skills, making Buried feel like an old fashioned whodunit as the reader pieces the clues together along with Sayer.

Readers looking for fast-paced, page-turning suspense and intrigue need look no farther than The Black Jersey. The new mystery from Mexican journalist Jorge Zepeda Patterson throws readers into the middle of the grueling 23-day, 2,000-mile Tour de France bicycle race through the French countryside.

Considered one of the most intense sporting events in the world, the Tour ends badly for many individuals who succumb to fatigue, bad luck or physical injury. Casualties are par for the course, but what no one can account for is the possibility that some of the contenders are being murdered.

Professional racer Marc Moreau of France, who rides for U.S.-based Team Fonar, provides a firsthand account of the events when he is approached by French Police Commissioner Favre to spy on his fellow cyclists from within in an effort to identify the potential killer. Moreau, who has some military police training but no real detective skills to call upon, doesn’t want to believe the worst of any of his competitors, but when he becomes the apparent target of a gas explosion in his camper, the threat becomes all too real.

It isn’t long before Moreau, who emerges as a contender to win the race, begins speculating about who could have it out for him and his fellow cyclists. Any of them would kill to stand on the podium at the end of the race. Even team managers, mechanics and his best friend and teammate, Tour favorite Steve Panata, are unable to escape suspicion. Every accident, every incident on course, becomes fuel for increasing speculation, testing loyalties, friendships and trust.

Patterson, whose work is aptly translated by award-winning writer Achy Obejas, mixes edge-of-your-seat racing action with dark suspense, all leading up to a surprising finale. Race out to get this one.

I cannot think of a mystery protagonist who harbors more secrets or confronts more ethical challenges than Detective Catrina “Cat” Kinsella. In her first adventure, Sweet Little Lies, Cat investigated a case in which her father figured prominently and perhaps not entirely innocently. Cat knows the whole story now, but she has been remarkably stingy about sharing the details with anyone, least of all her superiors at the London Metropolitan Police. In Caz Frear’s sequel, Stone Cold Heart, the parallels to Cat’s previous case are unmistakable: a charismatic yet somehow sinister suspect; a pair of killings years apart with similarities worth noting; and a cast comprised of members of an extraordinarily dysfunctional family, each with ample reason to shift blame onto the unlikable suspect. As Cat delves into the investigation, she begins to believe that the suspect may be the victim of an elaborate frame. On the other hand, said suspect is a seriously bad guy (even if not a murderer), so why should she exercise extreme measures to release this predator into the wild again? You will guess who did it, but you will be wrong.

Has anyone ever gotten an unexpected late-night call that didn’t immediately kickstart their anxiety? In the case of Ohio PI Roxane Weary, protagonist of Kristen Lepionka’s The Stories You Tell, the caller is her brother Andrew. The last time he’d called in the middle of the night had been to tell her that their father had died. This time doesn’t appear to be as dire, at least at first blush. A distraught former fling, Addison, had shown up at Andrew’s apartment and then disappeared, leaving behind only the record of a brief phone call and a deep scratch on Andrew’s neck from when he grabbed her arm in an attempt to keep her from running off into the cold night. But when Addison doesn’t turn up the next day, or the day after that, her family and friends begin to get worried, the authorities get summoned, and Andrew is on the hook as the last person to have seen her, the wound on his neck taking on ominous overtones. But from here it gets complicated—and moves from complicated to lethal in very short order. Roxane is easily one of the edgiest and most deeply flawed suspense heroines since Robert Eversz’s Nina Zero. Read this one, and you’ll soon be perusing the bookstore shelves for the previous two books in the series.

“Do not use the word gripping,” I admonish myself when writing this column each month. This is not a directive I arrived at easily, having already (ab)used that word 12,587 times before, give or take. I’m going to bring it out of retirement this month, however, for Aoife Clifford’s Second Sight, which is indeed—wait for it—gripping. Lawyer Eliza Carmody represents what the townspeople of Kinsale, Australia, consider to be the wrong side of a class-action suit against an electric company they deem responsible for starting a fatal bushfire. Complicating matters, Eliza is a Kinsale hometown girl, thus fully rendering her persona non grata with a broad swath of the population. When the police unearth a cache of human bones near a historic homestead called the Castle, Eliza cannot help but remember the disappearance of her best friend, still unsolved, shortly after a party at the Castle more than two decades ago. Now is as good a time as any to relaunch the investigation. Second Sight is a thematically rich study in fragile memories and outright duplicity. And yes, it is utterly gripping.

“Mississippi? . . . I didn’t know which part was craziest: that my mother wanted me to go to Mississippi on a case; that my mother wanted me to go to Mississippi on a case; or that my mother wanted me to go to Mississippi on a case.” It’s a good question, rife with possibilities for New York City PI Lydia Chin, narrator of S.J. Rozan’s Paper Son. The case in question revolves around a distant cousin accused of murdering his father. But before Lydia and her partner, Bill Smith, can talk to said cousin, he escapes from custody, thus accomplishing the one feat that could make him look even guiltier, especially when added to the already damning evidence of his proximity to the body when found and his fingerprints on the murder weapon. The term paper son refers to Chinese immigrants who came to the U.S. after the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. They were able to do this by purchasing fraudulent papers documenting them as blood relatives, typically sons or daughters, of legal Chinese immigrants. Many of those paper sons came to the Mississippi Delta, and one of them was the brother of Lydia Chin’s great-grandfather, hence the family connection. Rozan skillfully weaves this history into her narrative, adding texture and nuance to what is already a cracking good mystery.

Isaiah Coleridge may have gone legit as a private investigator, but his past life as a mob enforcer dies hard. When he’s hired to investigate a killing that mimics a prior hit, his former bosses expect results—and failure to please them is not an option. Coleridge digs in, but what he finds is not typical mafia tit-for-tat but something much darker. Black Mountain is a thriller that gets uncomfortably close to pure evil and lets you breathe in the stench.

Laird Barron (Blood Standard) doesn’t spare his half-Maori hero much. The story opens with Coleridge taking a bullet while defending himself against a pair of thugs, but he can be tender if guarded with his girlfriend and her young son. When Coleridge follows the trail of what turns out to be a serial killer, it leads him into a labyrinthine world of sophisticated weapons that can debilitate with sound or light, though they’re being used by someone who is also masterful with a knife.

The ugliness of the human condition contrasts with the gorgeous Hudson Valley, and Coleridge’s country shack is a refuge from the people who so often cross his path. His office, though, is a noir gem straight out of Hammett or Chandler, right down to the smoky glass in the door, and he has run-ins with a showgirl cut from similar cloth. After a harrowing showdown as the chase concludes, there’s a scene so tender it nearly induced whiplash. For all the darkness in Black Mountain, it has a hero who burns bright.