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.

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.