In Caroline Kepnes’ third You novel, Joe Goldberg is ready to settle down. Volunteering at a library on Bainbridge Island, he’s keeping things squeaky clean while also falling in love with his boss, Mary Kay. Her social and family ties distract her from Joe—the real thing, staring her in the face across the circulation desk—but this time, he’s committed to doing no harm. If he gently thumbs the scales of justice (and true love) in his favor, surely that will be OK, right? Of course, this new beginning is dogged by loose ends from his last known address that refuse to be neatly tied off.

You Love Me is a wild ride, full of twists and slapstick gore. It's also a metatext in some ways. Joe’s obsession with Mary Kay is true to what we know of him, and his interior monologue full of TV, music, film and book references make him a compelling antihero. Mary Kay’s relationship with a rocker from the heyday of Seattle’s grunge scene feels realistic, while her female friends are more like caricatures, overdrawn in a way that’s often hilarious. A plot thread featuring a screenplay based on Joe’s life is both a callback to Hidden Bodies and a wink at the Netflix series based on the books.

Kepnes makes Joe compelling in a way that allows for some brilliant sleight of hand. Surprises seem to come from out of nowhere, and the end is truly shocking, yet there’s a relaxed flow as it all unfolds. You Love Me is more broadly funny than You; Joe’s restraint from violence does not mean the body count is low, and some of the deaths are, to put it mildly, absolutely bonkers. The reader has to wrestle with a character who is charming, funny, well read, accommodating to a fault—and also a monster. Start here if you like, but be prepared to read the whole series. It will really get under your skin.

Freya Lyell is apprehensive about attending a wedding on the grounds of Byrne Hall; her sister Stella’s body was found not far away, and that loss still stings five years later. But when she sees a painting hanging in the main house that surely must be of Stella, her curiosity takes over. She returns to Byrne Hall alone and is rapidly absorbed into the world of Cory Byrne, his ailing mother, Diana, and the house itself, which is eerily attuned to its occupants.

The Whispering House is a gothic mystery whose ethereal tone and atmospheric detail allow it to step lightly between heavy revelations. Author Elizabeth Brooks (The Orphan of Salt Winds) establishes early on that Freya is still submerged in grief and guilt over her sister’s presumed suicide, despite the fact that many of her memories of Stella are of an impulsive young woman whose demands for attention tended to eclipse the rest of the family altogether.

Amid this grief, Freya’s numb quality makes her passive involvement with Cory, and her half-formed ideas of what their life together might be, poignant as well as also a great source of tension for the reader as more information about the house and its history come to light. It’s an odd feeling, being happy for Freya while also internally screaming for her to get out while she can.

As the story unfolds from varied points of view and different time periods, Diana’s role shifts from one at the fringes to something more central and frightening. She’s a matriarch to be reckoned with, to put it mildly. Peripheral characters—Freya’s father, a woman she meets while swimming, a man she loves but thinks she lost to Stella—are well rounded and figure into the plot in intricate ways.

Brooks’ gentle, depressive pace allows The Whispering House’s revelations to be truly shocking—the fallout from a missed phone call can feel as though the world hangs in the balance.

Windsor Horne Lockwood III has a charmed life: he’s a handsome, highly intelligent white man with access to immense generational wealth.

But every rose has its thorn, and in Harlan Coben’s suspenseful and oft-surprising Win, the rakish titular character explains that he has long had to contend with negative assumptions due to his name, slight frame and regal bearing. Even this is an advantage, however: It’s caused him to cultivate exceptional combat skills (those who underestimate him soon regret it, often from a hospital bed). This has made him an excellent sidekick to Myron Bolitar, the sports agent-turned-investigator at the forefront of 11 of Coben’s novels thus far. 

With Win, the author is trying something completely different. For the first time since readers met Win in 1995, the “preternaturally overconfident” sidekick emerges from the shadows to take center stage. His origin story is a departure from Coben’s Bolitar-universe narrative norm, one that readers will find intriguing thanks to a voice that is less open and more calculating, bolstered by a largely misanthropic worldview.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Harlan Coben reveals why he finally let Win step into the spotlight.

And Win’s got a lot to say, whether regarding his hedonistic pursuits or why the FBI thinks he knows something about a bizarre murder scene at a wealthy loner’s Manhattan penthouse. The FBI isn’t surprised Win doesn’t know the man, but are curious about two things found near him: a Vermeer painting stolen from the Lockwood family, and a suitcase bearing Win’s initials. 

The last time Win saw these items was 20 years prior, around the time his cousin Patricia was kidnapped and held prisoner at an isolated cabin. She escaped, but the case was never solved. Now, it seems this new murder victim was not only connected to Patricia’s terrifying ordeal, but to domestic terrorists who committed multiple as-yet-unsolved crimes 40 years ago.

Ever the investigator, Win delves into the past and casts a critical eye on the present, using his wits and wealth to gain access and information. Coben, as is his wont, raises moral dilemmas readers will enjoy chewing on and pulse-pounding action scenes will keep the pages at least semi-frantically turning. As lies are challenged, secrets are revealed and seemingly impossible decisions made, Win makes it clear that “Life is lived in the grays.”

Author Paul Vidich has once again proved his mastery of the espionage thriller with his edge-of-your-seat novel The Mercenary, which marks Vidich's fourth foray into the world of spies and intrigue.

Former CIA agent Aleksander Garin is recruited to help a senior KGB operative, known by the code name GAMBIT, escape from Moscow to Czechoslovakia. But there is a catch: He must also smuggle out GAMBIT’s wife and son.

To prove his worth and earn his freedom, GAMBIT is tasked with smuggling top-secret communiqués and papers to Garin. With the watchful eyes of the KGB and Russian loyalists all around him, the job is fraught with danger. As Vidich writes, “The lies had been harder to keep up, and he’d struggled to keep the layers of deception straight, knowing that a single mistake could be fatal.”

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Paul Vidich shares why he thinks the Cold War continues to fascinate readers.

When Garin becomes romantically interested in former Russian ballerina Natalya, who now works for the KGB, the risks multiply exponentially. Garin struggles with whom he can trust, including his contacts at the American Embassy, who have their own suspicions about Garin's loyalties and about his handler, CIA Station Chief George Mueller, who was previously expelled from Russia after a failed mission.

The Mercenary is fast paced and action packed, but Vidich lingers long enough to allow readers to experience Garin’s emotional highs and lows. In that regard, the novel deservedly draws comparisons to John le Carré’s tales of the intrepid spy George Smiley.

Amy Gentry’s new novel Bad Habits is so much fun to read that it feels like you’re cheating somehow. It’s got the perfect setting—a prestigious and pretentious grad school program ominously referred to as The Program, where students and professors misbehave outrageously. And the friendship at its heart detonates a series of double-crosses and revelations that are breathtaking and sometimes hilarious. How can one book be so unrelenting in its sense of unease, yet also so much fun?

Academic rock star Claire “Mac” Woods has just given a keynote address when she spies Gwen, her former best friend from grad school, at the hotel bar. It’s a prickly reunion, doused in alcohol, and Claire awakens from a blackout thinking she’s confessed a long-held secret. Said secret, and the story behind it, comes out in flashbacks as Claire hunts for Gwen (and I do mean hunts) inside the hotel. What unspools is a tale of class disparity, friendship, competition, infidelity and the variable exchange rates of sex and power. It’s a knockout.

Gentry’s light touch with such high-stakes subject matter is impressive. The program Gwen and Claire (who then went primarily by “Mac”) attended is rich in details that feel true to a university experience, even as the novel skewers how how much of that experience is artifice or make-believe. Several storylines tug at the reader’s attention, but Gentry continually reminds us of what we don’t yet know with a refrain that is jarring each time it reappears: “The accident. The farmhouse.” The misdirection pays off each time because we’re so invested in this fragile, fractured relationship.

If you liked Good as Gone, Gentry’s debut novel, Bad Habits has a theme in common with it: Sometimes the biggest surprises stem from a truth that was staring you in the face all along. Read Bad Habits for a satirically surreal take on higher education, and for an antihero you’ll lose sleep over.

When homesteader Dell Reddick Sr. decides to purchase a headstone for the son he lost 17 years ago, painful memories among his family members set into motion a series of events he could never have predicted. Swept up in the family ordeal is Deputy Sheriff Harley Jensen, who may be the only one who can restore the peace—if his own passions for one of the family don’t get in the way. Chris Harding Thornton unravels the intrigue and suspense in meticulously detailed fashion in her solid debut novel, Pickard County Atlas.

Set in 1978, the story takes place in the titular rural Nebraska county, where large tracts of farmland have been named after the people who lived there. Homesteads—many of which have folded or been abandoned—stretch over hundreds of acres, a detail which Thornton cannily uses to evoke the isolation and lonely frustration that bears down upon the remaining residents.

Harley is initially called to investigate a series of unusual thefts of clothing and other items from the homes of the recently deceased, as well as evidence of trespassing at other abandoned homes. One such excursion brings him in contact with Paul Reddick, the younger brother of Dell Jr., whose body was never found after he was killed in 1960 by Korean War veteran Rollie Asher.

Paul is no stranger to the law, as he has been in and out of jail on drug-related charges. Harley tries to go easy on him, knowing the trauma that Paul and his family have experienced. But when it becomes clear that both Paul and Harley are attracted to Paul’s older brother Rick’s wife, Pam, events build toward a confrontation for which neither is prepared.

Pickard County Atlas takes its time; there is no real sense of urgency or high stakes confronting Harley or any of the other characters. The closest thing to a central mystery is the weird series of thefts and break-ins. But Thornton, herself a seventh-generation Nebraskan, describes the landscape and interactions of the characters in such starkly realistic detail, you cannot help but get wrapped up in the novel’s noirish atmosphere and slow-burning mystery.

Riley Wolfe excels at what he does: elaborate, improbable, dangerous, lucrative art heists. He knows he’s the best, and he gets a substantial thrill out of accomplishing the seemingly impossible with flair and rough justice. As he explains in Jeff Lindsay’s Fool Me Twice, “It’s what I live for—grabbing stuff from people too rich and privileged to deserve it.”

Of course, Riley’s illicit activities make him very wealthy, which is quite helpful for establishing secret hideaways, paying subcontractors to assist him in his schemes and ensuring his beloved mother (who is in a persistent vegetative state) is well cared for. All of these elements come into play in Lindsay’s second Riley Wolfe novel (the first is 2019’s Just Watch Me), as a dizzying chain of betrayals, threats, double-crosses and misdirections add up to a wild international caper that’s at once nerve-wracking and fascinating in its extreme peril and layered complexity.

Riley’s newest boss, Patrick Boniface, is an arms dealer known for his ruthlessness—which pales compared to what his sidekick, torture aficionado Bernadette, likes to do for fun. Boniface informs Riley that he can either be Bernadette’s ill-fated plaything, or steal Raphael’s "The Liberation of St. Peter" . . . which is, unfortunately, a fresco that is part of a wall at the Vatican. It gets worse: A rival crime boss tells Riley that, if he doesn’t double-cross Boniface, Monique (the world’s best art forger and Riley’s quasi-romantic interest) will come to great harm. And, as is not uncommon with world-famous art thieves, there’s also an FBI agent determined to capture him once and for all.

At first, Riley is completely nonplussed; stealing a wall doesn’t happen to be within his expertise. But inspiration does strike, and Lindsay does an excellent job of building toward the solution via masterful feats of planning, costuming, social engineering and a well-placed felony (or several). Readers travel to various spots around the globe as Riley races to complete the job, protect his loved ones and live to steal another day. This frequently funny, always inventive, often quite dark thriller will delight fans of Lindsay’s bestselling Dexter series and the hit TV show it inspired.

Matthew Hart’s debut thriller, The Russian Pink, feels especially timely given its subject matter: a fraught presidential election and a Russian conspiracy.

A former diamond smuggler-turned-CIA-agent-turned-investigator for the U.S. Treasury, Alex Turner has dipped his toe in murky waters before in order to survive and feels comfortable operating in gray areas of the law. Turner is investigating an enormous pink diamond known as the Russian Pink that he suspects has shadowy origins. The problem is that the diamond is in a necklace that currently belongs to the wife of Harry Nash, a presidential candidate running in a highly charged election.

Politics may be the least of Turner’s problems, though. The Russian Pink is also linked to murder, stock fraud and Russian crime lords. It seems that by investigating the gem, Turner has opened a Pandora’s box. Suddenly Turner isn’t sure he can trust anyone, including his boss at the Treasury. When his daughter is targeted, he breaks from official channels and uses his CIA training to get to the people threatening him.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Matthew Hart explores the dangerous allure of diamonds.

This novel plays out like an action movie, fast-paced and globe-trotting from New York City to Antwerp to South Africa. Hart’s compelling hero isn’t afraid to resort to violence, and we see him engaging in everything from sword fights to falling off the balcony of a skyscraper’s penthouse. There’s also a dash of romance to temper the action scenes. Turner enlists the help of a diamond smuggler named Lily to help him, and as they race around the world in search of answers, a lingering tension between them blooms into something more.

The Russian Pink is a fast read, never once allowing the reader to catch their breath. Perfect for fans of Robert Ludlum and David Baldacci, this thriller will have readers anxiously awaiting Hart’s next novel.

With nationwide calls for police reform and defunding, literary giant John Grisham’s novel A Time for Mercy is undoubtedly timely, as it explores the ways that violence committed by or against law enforcement officials can complicate the pursuit of justice.

Jake Brigance—the hero of Grisham’s 1989 debut, A Time to Kill—is court-appointed to represent 16-year-old Drew Gamble in the shooting death of his mother’s boyfriend, deputy sheriff Stu Kofer. There’s no question that Drew pulled the trigger, but Jake faces an ethical challenge over whether the shooting was justified. Drew contends that he shot Stu in self-defense after believing Stu had killed his mother. Drew, his younger sister and their mother lived in constant fear of beatings by Stu, who often returned home in a drunken stupor.

Jake only wants to handle preliminary matters for the Gamble case until a permanent public defender can be appointed. But deep down, he realizes he’s the best chance the Gamble family has. With public sentiment and fellow police officers standing behind Stu and his family, Jake’s efforts to keep Drew from being tried as an adult and facing possible execution put him at odds with the community.

While there are lulls during some of the legal procedural bits, Grisham’s mastery of the courtroom thriller is never in question. As usual, he presents as smooth a read as you’ll ever experience. The dialogue is sharp and pointed, layered with genuine emotions that make the characters pop off the pages of this morally complex story.

Brilliant hacker-turned-MI6-agent Brigitte Sharp (she goes by “Bridge”) feels torn between opposing forces. She’s a member of the British intelligence agency’s elite cyber threat analytics unit and an excellent field agent, but she’s reluctant to leave desk duty since a failed mission three years ago. She’s close to her sister and friends but has become weary of lying to them to protect her cover. And her drive to seek justice has been tamped down by PTSD-fueled fear that she’ll harm someone because of her perceived incompetence.

Now, as Antony Johnston’s The Exphoria Code opens, Bridge’s life has come to a crisis point: Her boss and therapist are insisting she get back to fieldwork just as she learns her online friend Tenebrae_Z has been found dead—perhaps as a result of their attempts to decrypt mysterious ASCII (an electronic character encoding standard) art that the two came across online.

Bridge “had always thought of the truth as a mountain peak. . . . To reach it, you might have to negotiate tricky paths, shifting scree, falling boulders. But if you were persistent enough . . . you could eventually reach the summit and the truth would be revealed.” She comes up against a veritable mountain range of obstacles as she investigates Ten’s murder. For starters, the ASCII posts are related to a top-secret Anglo-French project involving military drones—a project that’s got a mole in its ranks, as well as plenty of dangerous people invested in keeping Bridge from finding out who the mole is or what nefariousness he or she is up to.

Johnston, perhaps best known for his graphic novel The Coldest City (which served as the source for the film Atomic Blonde), has once again created a heroine who’s as smart and savvy as she is badass. He lays a complex trail of clues, hazards and betrayals as Bridge goes undercover to track down the mole and ends up in tense interrogations, edge-of-your-seat chases and action-packed fights to the possible death. Can she unearth the mole before something terrible happens? Readers will thrill to the chase in this kickoff to a techno-thriller series that has at its center a hacker with a heart of gold—and nerves of steel.

A squeaky-clean honors student gets arrested for selling drugs. A gregarious old man vanishes in the middle of the night, leaving his beloved dog and his belongings behind. Longtime Black residents are disappearing from Gifford Place, and wealthy white people are moving in. Something is definitely wrong with this picture, and it’s worse than run-of-the-mill gentrification.

By now, many will have seen When No One Is Watching described as Rear Window meets Get Out. Those comparisons are shockingly apt. Alyssa Cole’s latest triumph incorporates elements of both psychological thriller and social horror. Its finale is a bit macabre, much like Get Out, and there is a romantic subplot as well, just as there was in Hitchcock’s masterpiece. But Cole’s story is also highly original. She is drawing directly from today’s turbulent social currents and grim realities, crafting a nightmare from everyday terrors, both large and small.

Through the story of one woman defending her home and her neighborhood, Cole dramatizes the economic displacement caused by racialized capitalism, as well as the petty skirmishes that take place between new settlers and old, between Black and white, on a daily basis in places like Fort Greene and Bed-Stuy in Brooklyn. There’s simply no one better equipped to distill the racial politics of this moment into intriguing and terrifying entertainment.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Alyssa Cole shares why she’s wanted to write about gentrification for years.

Perhaps the best evidence of Cole’s skill in this regard is the remarkable correspondence between a fictional event in the book and a real-life incident that occurred just miles away from where the book is set. In May, a white woman was walking her dog off-leash in Central Park (in violation of the rules). When a concerned Black birdwatcher asked her to leash her dog, she falsely accused him of threatening her and reported him to the police. The incident occurred many months after Cole had finished her manuscript, and yet the confrontation strikes a frighteningly similar chord as the one in her book.

A similar standoff occurs between the protagonist, Sydney, an African American woman who is a longtime owner of a brownstone on Gifford Place, and Kim, a “high-ponytailed,” Lululemon-wearing newcomer, who is white. Viewers of the Central Park video saw that Amy Cooper was the aggressor and that she explicitly used her racial identity to claim authority. Readers will find the same is true with Kim and Sydney. It’s all about social control. Kim has done something wrong and tries to get out of it by accusing Sydney of “making [her] feel unsafe” and, again just like Amy Cooper, saying, “I’ll call the police.” As Cole explained on Twitter, “it’s not because I’m prescient, it’s because this kind of power play happens all the time, in ways small and large, often from white people who don’t think they’re racist.”

Here, Cole actually exercises restraint. Though thrillers like Get Out tend to present heightened versions of reality until the grisly denouement, the tensions that Cole brings to life on the page are hardly exaggerated. The petty insults and indignities that occur on Gifford Place happen every day in shops and on corners throughout America. The book also includes snippets of discussions from a neighborhood forum called “OurHood,” which seems to be modeled on Nextdoor. The ending is a bit rushed, and some readers will question the need for some of the violence. Overall, though, this is a brilliant first foray into the genre. Cole leverages her strengths to great effect, incorporating history, biting social observation and even a little romance along the way.

Another element that distinguishes When No One Is Watching is its grounding in not just present-day politics but history. Cole made her name in historical romance, and it shows. The Brooklyn history she includes enriches and deepens the story, placing current events and the characters’ experience with systemic racism today firmly in context and conversation with the past. The story Cole tells is a disturbing one, but that doesn’t make it any less true.

Virgil Wounded Horse is a man living tentatively between two worlds. On the one hand, he feels an obligation to his Lakota upbringing. On the other, the tragic deaths of his mother and sister have caused him to drift away from this heritage. But when his 14-year-old nephew, Nathan, nearly dies after a heroin overdose, Virgil’s loyalties are put to the test. A recovering alcoholic, Virgil vows to protect his family and his tribe as best he can by seeking out those bringing the drugs into his community and exacting his revenge.

The police are no help on South Dakota’s Rosebud Indian Reservation, so it falls to men like Virgil to mete out the tribe’s own brand of justice when necessary. When the trail leads off reservation, however, and into the purview of the FBI, Virgil’s hands are tied. The only way around it may be by allowing the Feds to use Nathan as a confidential informant in a pair of drug buys, or else Virgil may see his nephew imprisoned in an adult institution for distribution of narcotics.

Virgil’s quest for justice is further complicated when he is reunited with his former girlfriend, Marie, who still embraces much of their heritage. The daughter of Ben Short Bear, who is running for tribal president, she is torn by the opportunity to attend medical school off campus, which could mean leaving the reservation and Virgil behind.

On the surface, David Heska Wanbli Weiden’s debut novel, Winter Counts, is somewhat typical for its genre: Bad guys disrupt the status quo when they muscle into the community, pushing bad drugs on an unsuspecting and highly susceptible teen population, until a vigilante or detective pushes back. The difference here is the setting on the Lakota reservation, the clash of policies between the U.S. government and Native American life, and the internal conflicts of the novel’s main characters.

Weiden, who is a member of the Sicangu Lakota Nation, elevates an otherwise routine crime novel with Native American culture and traditions, political differences and organized crime. His well-rendered, emotionally charged characters do the rest.

The Girls Weekend opens with an invitation. International bestselling young adult writer Sadie MacTavish is gathering her college friends for a weekend getaway in the Pacific Northwest to celebrate their friendship and her cousin Amy’s pregnancy. The reunited Fearless Five prepare for a perfect weekend organized by their perfect friend, complete with wine, kayaking and plenty of rehashing of past adventures (as well as grievances).

But the weekend takes a sour turn when their host abruptly goes missing, leaving behind a massive bloodstain, a messy house and a missing statue. None of the friends remember the night before, but all know the truth: With tensions high, any of them could be responsible for Sadie’s apparent murder. The only problem is that none of them knows who.

Jody Gehrman’s latest thriller is a locked-room mystery in which no one even knows how the room got locked in the first place. The women—possibly including the killer—dont’t know who’s responsible for Sadie’s disappearance, to the point that they think they might have all been drugged. Paranoia and claustrophobia prevail as our narrator, English professor June Moody, tries to uncover what happened to her perfect and perfectly infuriating friend. Gehrman slowly and skillfully doles out one bit of recovered memory at a time as June gets closer to the truth, and as the innocence of each character is questioned in turn.

With intimate character studies and breathtaking suspense, The Girls Weekend deals with old relationships turned brittle with age, inviting the reader to an idyllic haven and then abruptly shattering the calm.