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.

In Ireland, history drapes itself over the present day like fog. Detective Chief Superintendent Frankie Sheehan finds herself searching for a serial killer whose present-day atrocities keep pulling her back in time in The Killer in Me. Olivia Kiernan’s latest mystery has a whipsaw plot and list of suspects that will chill your blood.

DCS Sheehan is called to a crime scene in a church; two victims are posed on the floor, one topless and the other in priest’s vestments. The murders gnaw at her, but she’s distracted by a campaign to clear the name of Seán Hennessey, who at just seventeen was convicted of murdering his parents and attempting to kill his sister. Now a free man, a new documentary seeks to clear his name, but if it succeeds it will be a terrible blow to the police department. Meanwhile, another body has been found. Frankie’s caught in the middle of what seem at first like separate issues, but they gradually merge into a race against time to prevent things from coming much too close to home.

Kiernan spins this tale with gritty realism—you can feel the damp chill of an Irish summer and smell the creosote and salt along the coast. Investigators are stymied again and again as evidence is contradicted or searches come up blank. And Frankie struggles with her own recollection of events, wondering if there was anything she could have done to prevent the original murders—a member of the family reached out to her mother for help at the time, but Frankie was just a child then. This lingering guilt crashes into concern about the impact new revelations might have on her current job.

Pitting loyalty to family against the search for truth and justice, The Killer in Me is a high-stakes noir page turner.

Flora Dane, the tough-as-nails survivor of a traumatic kidnapping, is back in Never Tell, the twisty new thriller from the always reliable Lisa Gardner.

For the unfamiliar, Flora leapt into readers’ hearts in Gardner’s 2016 bestseller, Find Her. In Never Tell, Flora, though still haunted by the abuse she endured while captive to Jacob Ness for 472 days, is working as a confidential informant for the Boston Police Department. But when businessman Conrad Carter is shot dead at the alleged hands of his wife, Evie, Flora’s past trauma comes racing back. Flora dimly recalls having met Conrad once before, in the company of her previous tormentor. But how Conrad and Jacob were connected—and what, if any, role Conrad had in her abduction—remains a mystery.

Gardner gives plenty for readers to ponder as Flora’s ordeal is only part of the myriad mysteries and surprises in store in her latest novel. There’s also Evie to consider—turns out, she’s an enigma as well. Over a decade ago, the now-pregnant teacher was implicated in the shooting death of her father. Evie escaped prosecution as the death was ruled accidental, but she’s an even stronger suspect in her husband’s shooting. Evie, though, contends she found Conrad shot in the office of their suburban home and only shot Conrad’s laptop computer after seeing a collection of sordid pictures he kept on it.

Gardner’s favorite recurring police detective, D.D. Warren, who previously investigated Evie’s father’s death, has a difficult time believing her innocence this time. It’s only after Flora reveals her possible connection to Conrad that D.D. begins to suspect there may be something more lurking behind both shootings and Flora’s kidnapping.

Told in emotionally gripping chapters from each character’s perspective, Never Tell is layered with the type of mystery, surprise and suspense that Gardner is rightfully acclaimed for.

Calcutta has been much less safe for murderers and brigands since Captain Sam Wyndham and his Indian assistant, Surrender-Not Banerjee, hit the crime-solving scene, first in A Rising Man, then followed up by 2018’s A Necessary Evil. They return this month in Abir Mukherjee’s riveting novel of the investigation of a serial killer, Smoke and Ashes. Having returned from the Great War, Wyndham takes on the role of captain in the British Imperial Police, finding it essential to keep secret one major aspect of his life. In the aftermath of the war, he has developed a rather severe opium addiction. An opium den is no proper place for a policeman, of course, so when Wyndham is present at a den that gets subjected to a raid, he beats a hasty retreat. In doing so, he comes upon the brutalized body of a Chinese man, a man who clearly suffered grievously before being put to death. Murder piles upon murder, and Wyndham must walk the fine line between investigating the crime without exposing himself as an addict. Mukherjee has a substantive grasp of colonial Indian history, and his books have the feel of a modern-day and much more progressive Kipling, full of high intrigue and derring-do, yet overlaid with the day-to-day reality of a struggle with addiction.

Grab a towel—although it’s early in the year, JoAnn Chaney’s As Long as We Both Shall Live is the perfect beach read, a multiple-murder and suspense saga that will keep readers engrossed and guessing.

Two women are killed, one in 1995, the other in 2018, both wives of successful salesman Matt Evans. The second incident is a literal cliffhanger: Matt and his second wife, Marie, are hiking in Rocky Mountain National Park when she falls off a steep cliff into a raging river below.

Detectives Marion Spengler and Ralph Loren doubt the double tragedies are coincidences, although Loren, who appeared in Chaney’s first novel, What You Don’t Know, is bedeviled by his own demons, including a former partner who mysteriously disappeared and whose remains have recently been unearthed. Half-Korean and-half American young mother Spengler is a likable, determined sleuth likely to appear in future novels.

Chaney continues to explore dark themes with her quick but effective character studies and zippy prose. The Colorado-based author is particularly adept at juggling multiple narrators and plot lines, revealing a multitude of tantalizing thoughts and actions while keeping the suspense as high as those Rocky Mountains. Chaney adds to the intrigue a host of song references, calling the novel’s first two sections “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” and “Mama, Just Killed a Man.” Appropriately, the title of the book must be a nod to the Deicide death metal song, “Not as Long as We Both Shall Live.”

As one detective tells naturally suspicious Spengler, “You shouldn’t take anyone at face value.” And neither should readers of As Long as We Both Shall Live. Movie rights have already been snatched up by producer Bruna Papandrea, whose projects include Gone Girl, “Big Little Lies” and The Nightingale.

BookPage Top Pick in Fiction, starred review, February 2019

Jane Harper has had enormous success with her mystery series about loner Detective Aaron Falk (The Dry and Force of Nature), which married the gritty realism of small-town Australian life with complicated criminal investigations. Her new standalone, The Lost Man, is bound to win her further accolades. It’s a timely and riveting family drama set in a desolate area of Queensland that will keep you guessing until the final pages.

When you live under a punishing sun on a cattle ranch the size of a small European country, you know not to travel without a full complement of food, water and a working vehicle. So when Cam Bright is found dead of dehydration in the desert only a few miles from his well-stocked car, his brothers Nathan and Bub are shocked and baffled. The mystery of Cam’s death brings longstanding family tensions between Nathan, Bub, their mother and Cam’s wife, Ilse, to the fore and escalate when decades-old allegations of Cam’s assault of a summer worker resurface. The burden of understanding these complex family ties falls heavily on older brother Nathan, who is dealing with his unresolved feelings for Ilse and trying to build a relationship with his estranged teenage son.

The grim crimes in The Lost Man are as much shaped by the rural landscape as by the actions of any one individual. With thoughtful regard for the impact of domestic violence, Harper keeps a sharp focus on a handful of characters that populate these enormous tracts of land where neighbors live up to three and four hours apart. As in her previous novels, the harsh environment plays a pivotal role, as significant as any of her characters. An unforgiving wasteland, the ranch is a place where isolation takes a long-simmering psychological toll, and everyone knows being out in the sun for too long could kill you.

This article was originally published in the February 2019 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In any gathering of mystery writers, Tim Dorsey would be the resident jester, providing more laughs per page than virtually anyone else. His amiably psychopathic protagonist, Serge Storms, is a modern-day Don Quixote, tilting at the windmills of politics, ageism, sexism and any other –ism that happens to catch his fancy. In his latest adventure, No Sunscreen for the Dead, Storms invades a Florida retirement community in the wake of a very public sex scandal featuring a 68-year-old retiree and her much younger boy toy. There are two reasons behind Storms’ invasion, one being that he is perversely fascinated by this salacious news item, the other being that he wants to find an interesting place to live out his golden years. He has all the necessary gear for that, including plaid shorts and knee-length black socks. And the white belt, without which the ensemble, well, c’est incomplète. As the plot develops, Storms gets conscripted into the investigation of some big-dollar swindling in the old folks’ community, and high jinks ensue. And because it is Dorsey chronicling said high jinks, be prepared for mirth—lots and lots of mirth.

This article was originally published in the January 2019 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Gytha Lodge’s suspenseful new psychological thriller, She Lies in Wait, tells the story of a ruinous outing and its aftermath decades later. Thirty- odd years ago, six friends went camping. Only five came home, and there was never a trace of the missing girl, Aurora Jackson. Her friends, a wide-ranging volunteer search party and even police with cadaver dogs turned up nothing—until now, when a young girl on a family holiday discovers a detached finger beneath a hollow tree within steps of the friends’ original campsite. Police Detective Chief Inspector Jonah Sheens knew Aurora peripherally from his high school days, but he decided to stay on the investigation—a decision his assistant, Detective Inspector Juliette Hanson, will come to question as the investigation proceeds. This isn’t the only secret that comes to light: One of the campers, an Olympic star in later life, displayed a morbid fascination with young women; another of the group, now a well-regarded politician, was caught by Aurora in flagrante delicto with another boy, and more importantly, he had placed a large supply of Dexedrine in the hollow of that tree. I am just scratching the surface of the secrets here. There are plenty more to unearth for yourselves.

This article was originally published in the January 2019 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In James Bond movies, one of the many ways of ratcheting up the tension is to introduce a Bad Thing About to Happen in, say, five minutes’ time, and to regularly return to the flashing digital countdown amid the action to see how much time is left before the Bad Thing transpires. Author Taylor Adams updates this suspense-building device in his supercharged novel No Exit with a dwindling cellphone battery peppering the high-tension text. The scene: a lonely snowbound rest area in rural Colorado, a place with little to no cellphone service, and a protagonist who has left her charger at home on what will prove to be the worst night of her life. At risk are a kidnapped child, albeit a rather resourceful one; a pair of innocent (or maybe not) bystanders; and the aforementioned protagonist, a college student named Darby Thorne, who was en route to her mother’s hospital bedside before her plans were interrupted by the freakish snowstorm and an even more freakish group of fellow strandees at the mountain shelter. Oh, and one last thing, and it really is the last thing—the twist ending is way cool.

This article was originally published in the January 2019 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.