Celebrated Japanese author Keigo Higashino makes his authorial power internationally known with Malice, the latest installment in his mystery series featuring police detective Kyochiro Kaga. This well-crafted dual narrative will entice and perhaps even outwit the most seasoned mystery readers.

This time Kaga finds himself on the case of a well known novelist, Kunihiko Hidaka, who was found murdered in his study by his wife and his best friend the night before his departure to Vancouver. The victim’s former best friend happens to be Osamu Nonoguchi, Kaga’s former colleague from his time as a public school teacher prior to joining the force.

Kaga is relentless in his search for Hidaka’s murderer, but there are key evidentiary elements that don’t add up for it to be as one-and-done as a break and entry gone awry. On a hunch he targets Nonoguchi, despite his vetted alibi, but does not have hard evidence to link him to the case—yet. Kaga’s persistency and detective precision in his search to expose the truth is exhaustive, and has him digging back so far as to uproot past unpleasantries such as middle school bullying practices and to question the supposed friendship between Hidaka and Nonoguchi.

This astute read is methodically constructed and will continuously challenge and enchant readers through strategic layering and its calculated release of critical information. Malice exhibits how the smallest seed of dislike can manifest into sinister, unjustified hatred. Someone who shares a smile with you could be plotting your demise.

It’s impossible! The body of a young woman, dead only a few hours, is discovered in a pose that suggests she was trying to claw her way out of her own grave. To add an even more macabre touch, the gravesite is that of a woman who has been dead for two years.

Magic and murder make a spectacular entrance in Angel Killer, an intricate thriller with techno overtones written by illusionist Andrew Mayne. Originally self-published as a best-selling eBook, the novel now appears in a newly revised version from Bourbon Street Books. This is good news for jaded mystery fans who believe every possible character type has been imagined and brought to life. Nope! Jessica Blackwood grew up in a family of magic purveyors; her father, grandfather and great-grandfather formed a dynasty of famous illusionists, and Jessica joined the family business, making a name for herself as a clever young female magician.

For Jessica, however, there was one trick too many, and fallout from a fateful experience led her to abandon magic and her famous family for a career in law enforcement. Now an FBI agent, she puts her former skills to use when she becomes an advisor to a team studying the graveside crime, which appears to be a feat of incredible, gruesome magic. She’s called upon to think outside the box—or grave, as it were—and discover how the horrendous illusion was perpetrated. The “trick” horrifies but becomes a public sensation and a perfect prelude to more spectacular and deadly events.

The trick for Jessica and the FBI team is to ensure that the public recognizes that there is an evil, and very mortal, killer behind the “magical” and deadly crimes. Jessica’s elusive and mysterious former lover, Damian, watches her from the shadows, adding a frisson of further excitement to the scene.

Angel Killer is both addictive and at times ludicrous, as when the FBI misses clues simple enough for a child in grade school. But the whole book is one big glittery magic trick, guaranteed to ensnare readers who love a great illusion, with a lot of authentic tricks of the magic trade thrown in. This story magnifies the creepy possibilities of social media and its own very great illusions. So, “Like” fans, beware! It’s all smoke and mirrors in the virtual world, sometimes with lethal consequences.

M.P. Cooley’s first novel Ice Shear is a solid, convincing mystery set in the snowy shadows of Hopewell Falls, New York. The story follows June Lyons, a former FBI agent who traded her big badge for the life of a small-town police officer to care for her sick husband, who has since passed. In an attempt to spend more time with her daughter and to fall in better with the police force, she volunteers for the graveyard shift. Her nights pass with no more excitement than driving drunks home and buying doughnuts for the morning shift.

The dear old town of Hopewell Falls is similar to Mayberry, until one night June finds a body of a celebrated congresswoman’s daughter impaled on icy shears that web the bottom of a frozen waterfall. The damage to the body indicates the girl died before the fall, but it’s only after another bloody body connected to the victim turns up that the case escalates into the murder mystery of the century and exposes the corrupt underbelly of a town laced with meth.

This pleasurable police procedural takes a while to pick up and does a fair job of telling Lyons’ side story as the main plotline progresses. Be patient, though—it’s worth the wait, as the story’s originality keeps readers engaged. When do you ever have a perilous biker gang showdown against a congresswoman who is in line for the vice presidency? Perhaps a trained mystery reader can see through the whodunit veil, but Cooley does an excellent job of taking readers through enough twists and turns that you’ll likely be guessing until the very end.

There are several ways to know whether you’ve got a really fine novel on your hands, and you can tell pretty quickly that Dry Bones in the Valley is a debut of that caliber.

First, author Tom Bouman knows his rural Pennsylvania setting and is familiar with its smallest details, from inhabitants’ accents and manners to their dilapidated trailer homes, and from animal tracks in the woods to the winds and the night sky. Second, the plot unfolds just right, beckoning with its authenticity and maintaining a flow that stays true to the characters and the narrator’s sense of how things are. The storyline may commence with a simple atmosphere, but it conceals unspoken depths that reveal themselves without an excess of words or urging by the author. Third, the people fit snugly in their roles, and their dialogue sounds true in every way—even when their backs are turned, we sense they’re still in character.

The understated, straightforward Henry Farrell is one of only two police officers in Wild Thyme township, a rural area where folks are not shy about dressing in camo or expressing their feelings about the hazards of “too much government.” This is hunting and fishing country, and Harry, who does some hunting himself, uses metaphors of field and forest as he seeks the killer of an unknown John Doe found high on a ridge. When a colleague is murdered, the action escalates, and Harry’s strength and patience is sorely tested.

Descriptions of the rural backcountry and its residents immerse readers in a landscape that rings with authenticity, humor and also great sadness. For some, grinding poverty rubs shoulders with the anticipation of a financial windfall, as the juggernaut of corporate gas drilling and fracking moves slowly across the Pennsylvania landscape, buying rights to property after property to feed its ever-escalating need for drilling sites.

With more questions than answers, Harry maneuvers the tangled trails, underbrush and home-grown meth labs that pockmark the countryside, contending with a colorful cast of locals, including a sad, aging recluse, the drugged-out “People of the Bus,” gun-happy revenge seekers, and last but far from least, the mysterious lady of the bog.

For crime aficionados, New York Times best-selling author Marcia Muller is always a welcome name, one to rely on when you want a sure thing—a book that captures the imagination and might even make you wish you’d cancelled your evening plans so you could just go on reading. Her latest, The Night Searchers—to be exact, number 31 in her San Francisco-based Sharon McCone series—promises to be that kind of book.

Muller is quick out of the gate with a catchy plot hook: A weird couple seeks help from PI McCone’s detective agency because the wife is “seeing things.” As husband Jay rolls his eyes and pats her shoulder, wife Camilla describes witnessing devil worshippers operating from the basement hole of a city excavation, possibly conducting a human sacrifice. The canny, pragmatic McCone intuits that something more than mental instability is at work here, and sure enough, the unlikely scenario soon begins to tie into an investigation underway by RI International, the firm run by McCone’s husband, Hy, a high-level hostage negotiator. McCone and Hy discover a non-Satanic connection between Camilla’s sighting and the titular Searchers, a shadowy bunch of treasure hunters prowling the ’Frisco streets, and with the kidnapping of the director of a political policy forum.

Hy and McCone dispatch researchers and operatives from their companies to connect the dots and discover what, besides treasure, the mysterious Searchers may be hunting, and how it may tie in with kidnappings and devilish conclaves. McCone becomes the suspect in a supposed murder attempt and hides out for a while in a safe house aptly called Cockroach Haven while directing the investigation. The story sports Muller’s usual mix of eccentric characters, not least the Searchers themselves, all with fake names containing the letter “Z.”

The McCone and RI agencies seem to have the power to do almost anything, from calling up the troops to calling off the troops, and the action never stalls. But this time around, Muller’s narrative has a choppy feel to it, jumping from one thing to another and occasionally losing its focus and our attention. The couple’s too-spiffy upscale lifestyle has also become a bit wearing, and readers will miss the old days when McCone operated out of the All Souls Legal Co-op and scavenged around for her daily bread. We are amply compensated, however, by the captivating tour of San Francisco sights and sounds that’s woven throughout the book.

Chicago is infamous for its violence, from Prohibition-era mobsters to modern-day street gangs. As a result, novels set in Chicago often fall somewhere on the spectrum of crime fiction. Lori Rader-Day’s blood-tingling debut—a mystery so chock-full of suspense it’s best devoured in a single late-night reading session—imagines a different brand of violence in Chicago, a phenomenon that’s become all too familiar in the 21st century: school shootings.

Ten months ago, Rothbert University professor Amelia Emmet was shot in the gut by a male student she’d never met. Unfortunately, no one believes Amelia’s side of the story. She’s young, attractive and popular with students, so Chicago news media—as well as Amelia’s friends and colleagues—don’t understand why a complete stranger would shoot her before turning the gun on himself. “I don’t know what they all thought—that I baited a troubled kid, drove him insane with sex or quid pro quo grading practices, and then suffered the only outcome that made any sense? Got what I deserved? Asked for it? That was a phrase I’d come across more than once in the comments section of the student newspaper’s website.”

But if anyone can solve the mystery of her attempted murder, it’s Amelia. She’s a sociology professor who specializes in violence. With the help of painkillers and a walking cane, Amelia returns to Rothbert University, where she meets an earnest young graduate assistant named Nathaniel Barber who’s obsessed with the history of Chicago’s criminal underworld. There’s just one problem: He’s a little obsessed with Amelia, too. Together, they discover Amelia’s role in Rothbert’s shrouded pattern of death.

Rader-Day’s addictive prose is atmospheric and laced with dread. Rothbert’s lakeshore campus in the shadow of Chicago drips with dark secrets, and as in all good mysteries, every character is enigmatic and fascinating.

A perfect thriller for the summer, The Black Hour transcends the tropes and formulas of the mystery genre while deftly portraying academia and the city of Chicago as characters in their own right.

For most high school bullying victims, life eventually gets better. For Toni Murphy, her torment at the hands of a mean-girl clique turns into a nightmare she can’t escape.

As her senior year draws to a close, Toni is planning a future with her adored boyfriend Ryan. He’s the one bright spot in her life. At home, her overly strict mom disapproves of everything she does. Her “perfect” little sister Nicole always seems to make her look bad, while getting away with sneaking out and lying to their parents. And at school, she’s taunted by a popular girl group led by her ex-friend Shauna. Graduation can’t come soon enough

Then Nicole is found brutally murdered. Toni and Ryan are the only suspects, and Shauna’s crew testifies that they saw the two sisters fighting right before the murder.  No one believes Toni’s side of the story, and she’s sent to prison.

That Night takes up Toni’s story 17 years later. She’s paroled and back in her hometown, but starting a new life isn’t so easy: Shauna is still nursing a grudge and is eager to get Toni fired or worse. Meanwhile, someone has been talking about what really happened on the night of the murder. Ryan wants her to help him find out more.  Her parole decrees that she could be sent back to jail just for talking to him, but the lure of clearing her name is irresistible. Who killed Nicole? And what secrets was she keeping in the days before her death?

The narrative bounces back and forth between Toni’s post-parole and pre-prison life, deftly building suspense about Nicole’s fate. But it’s Toni’s richly depicted inner life that makes the book truly immersive. Chevy Stevens’ account of what it’s like to be powerless—whether as a grounded 12th-grader or a prison inmate—is pitch perfect (and relatable to anyone who’s ever been a teen). We see Toni grow from an impulsive girl to a guarded but good-hearted adult, and her desire for justice always rings true.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a behind-the-book essay from Chevy Stevens for That Night.

Small in size and easy on the eye, ear and virtual palette, the co-written Treachery in Bordeaux is a pleasant undertaking, light on action and suspense but generously laden with French atmosphere and extra flavor for the wine cognoscenti. In the U.S. debut of the first book in the Winemaker Detective Series already underway in France, translator Anne Trager has managed to retain the cadence of the French original with her understated and flowing narrative. Sentences that start out with documentary plainness suddenly branch out with a graceful, humorous ease, making one want to read the book in its original language.

Well-respected and successful winemaker and critic Benjamin Cooker is something of an amateur sleuth. He undertakes to help respected vintner and good friend Denis Massepain investigate the contamination of several barrels of new wine he is fermenting at his wine estate, Chateau Les Moniales Haut-Brion. The wine cellars are scrupulously clean and recently renovated, so accidental contamination is ruled out and sabotage suspected.

Benjamin is a man of curiosity and wide-ranging interests, and he and his new assistant, the young and goodlooking Virgile Lanssien, are soon knee-deep in grape-laden schemes to determine who might want to destroy Massepain’s wine and his longstanding reputation as a fine vintner.

Readers slow down a bit to accommodate Benjamin’s lifestyle, enjoying his obsession with collecting antiques, especially those associated with his trade. One such item he’s acquired is a painting, or overmantel, depicting the rural area around his own estate—and he discovers that it has a twin, another panel that connects it to a larger artwork. His efforts to track down the missing section lead to more discoveries, and this curious side-trip may connect back to the intrigue at his friend’s winery.

Treachery capitalizes on the attractions of the French countryside and its inhabitants, as they sip coffee at an outdoor café, toast a birthday with the proper vintage, light up an aromatic pipe or walk their dogs. Benjamin quiets his mind, for instance, by painstakingly polishing his shoes.

This genteel atmosphere, however, is shot through with disquieting signs that the rural beauty is fraying at the edges. Like the rest of the world, the Bordeaux region faces encroachment by seedy housing developments, traffic jams and tourism with its tacky accoutrements. This collision of old and new provides the book with its suspense quotient—for all those who love a mystery.