Meet Heidi Kick: former beauty queen, current interim sheriff and her rural Wisconsin county’s best hope for a future not completely marred by crime, misogyny and general horribleness.

In the opening pages of John Galligan’s dark mystery thriller Bad Axe County, we learn that back in 2004, 18-year-old Heidi was crowned Miss Wisconsin Dairy Queen and, later that night, learned that her parents had died. The police called it murder-suicide, but she knew in her gut it wasn’t true.

Fast-forward to 2016, and Heidi’s still determined to find out the truth, this time from a better vantage point. She’s an excellent investigator and law-enforcer who’s been named interim sheriff of Bad Axe after the death of her corrupt predecessor. The late sheriff was an enthusiastic participant in the remote county’s good ol’ boy network, the members of which secured their power via nepotism, fraud and far more sinister endeavors—and will do seemingly anything to keep Heidi from being elected sheriff. Heidi soon finds herself embroiled in a search for a missing girl, Pepper Greengrass, while a major ice storm threatens to catastrophically flood the rough, wild landscape at the edge of the mighty Mississippi River.

As the action ratchets up and danger seems to loom at every turn, Galligan deftly alternates between Heidi’s and Pepper’s points of view, plus that of Angus Beavers, a former local baseball star who’s returned home to right deadly wrongs. Readers will find themselves eager to see how the various storylines will converge and wary of what shocks the next pages might reveal.

Bad Axe County is quite a ride, with its unapologetic acceptance of the presence of evil among us and its occasional sharp shots of humor and hope amid the devastation. It’s also a layered exploration of the ways that long-held secrets and shame can reach far into the future—with a suspenseful, likely gasp-inducing final act that will leave readers hoping they haven’t seen the last of Heidi, and of Bad Axe County.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our Q&A with John Galligan about Bad Axe County.

Imagine waking to realize that you can’t move, you can’t speak or even blink, yet you’re fully aware of everything and everyone around you. Then imagine there is a crazed killer who will stop at nothing to extract a secret from you. For Hammel College senior Tara Beckley, she doesn’t have to imagine it. It’s real. And it’s terrifying. That’s the frightening premise of If She Wakes, the newest novel from thriller master Michael Koryta.

Events start innocently enough as Tara chauffeurs professor Amandi Oltamu across town to deliver the keynote address at her Maine liberal arts school’s conference. When Oltamu asks her to stop, she figures he simply has the jitters about his speech. But he follows up with an odd request to take a picture of her on his cellphone and then to lock the phone in the glovebox of her car. Again, she obliges. But before they can get underway again, the pair are struck by an apparently out of control driver. Oltamu is instantly killed in the collision while Tara is knocked senseless, only to “wake” in the hospital surrounded by doctors and family.

Koryta puts the reader in Tara’s shoes for some truly claustrophobic chapters in which her predicament is made all too clear. She can’t move, she can’t communicate, but she can hear everyone as they discuss her fate.

While staying in Tara’s tortured mind is harrowing enough, Koryta throws in a few other characters and a half dozen plot twists to ratchet up the tension even further. Insurance investigator Abby Kaplan discovers Oltamu’s phone, while Dax Blackwell, a young hitman out to prove himself worthy of his father’s legacy, strives to take it from her. But it won’t do either of them any good unless Tara can unlock its secrets.

Koryta keeps the action fast and furious, tempered with his characters’ determination to persevere against all odds.

The title: A Friend Is a Gift You Give Yourself. The author: William Boyle: The place: Brooklyn. The cast of characters includes Wolfie, an erstwhile porn star and quite the pneumatic bad girl in her day; Lucia, a precocious teenage girl with a larcenous hit-man boyfriend; Rena, the 60-ish widow of an infamous mob boss; and perhaps best of all, a lovingly cared-for 1962 Chevy Impala, an ideal chariot for making one’s getaway from the scene of the crime. Especially when the crime is clocking (with a heavy glass ashtray) a geriatric neighbor making unwanted advances, and then leaving him for dead on his living room floor. The perpetrator, Rena, is in full-on panic mode, and the ’62 Impala is her ticket out. But this is only the initial crime, with a bag full of purloined mob money and a coalition of women inadvertently on the run with their ill-gotten gains. This all sounds a little bit loopy, along the lines of Carl Hiaasen or Tim Dorsey, and there is indeed a surreal element to this caper. But there is also more than a little Thelma & Louise in Boyle’s terrific tale, which has some of the most stylish noir prose to grace the page in some time.

T.J. Martinson’s The Reign of the Kingfisher is a bit outside my wheelhouse, but I didn’t let that get in my way, and you shouldn’t either. This genre-bending book has plenty for suspense fiction aficionados to revel in. Thirty years back, a superhero known as the Kingfisher performed heroic deeds in the mean streets of Chicago. Revered by some, reviled by others, he was by any measure a Windy City legend. And then he died, or so the official story goes—conspiracy theories and rumors of a high-level cover-up abound. And now, a person or persons unknown have taken a room full of hostages, threatening serial execution unless the police confirm the true fate of the Kingfisher. For retired journalist Marcus Waters, the Kingfisher story was a career maker. And now, three decades later, the revived legend could put him back on top, if he can be the one to break the story. So with a ragtag support staff consisting of a talented hacker and a police officer who has fallen from grace, Waters reopens the investigation into the life (and maybe death?) of the Kingfisher. Meanwhile, the lives of the hostages hang in the balance.

When you read as many suspense novels in the run of a month as I do, you naturally gravitate toward characters that it would please you to count as friends in real life. For me, that list would include (among others) Martin Walker’s Périgord protagonist, Bruno, Chief of Police; James R. Benn’s wartime hero Billy Boyle; and this month’s entrant, Donna Leon’s Venice Police Inspector Guido Brunetti. His 29th adventure, Unto Us a Son Is Given, starts when a wealthy, elderly man adopts a younger man as his son, causing some consternation among the rich man’s intimates, as the adopted son now stands to inherit the entire estate. Naturally, the old man dies shortly thereafter, and tongues start wagging. Then, when one of his closest confidantes is found strangled to death in her hotel room, the plot begins to thicken like roux over a blue flame. Leon is a multifaceted, effortlessly assured writer. Her plots are innovative and layered, her characters have developed and matured over the course of a lengthy series, and her prose is imbued with wit and compassion on virtually every page. If you are a fan of Louise Penny (and who isn’t?), Leon should be on your short list.

Top Pick in Mystery, November 2018

Ken Bruen’s Jack Taylor series has been a mainstay of my professional and pleasure reading since the Shamus Award-winning The Guards (2001). The series follows the downfall of Galway cop Taylor and his efforts to climb out of the (very deep) hole he created for himself with his alcoholism and his exceptionally poor choices of friends and lovers. The opening pages of In the Galway Silence find Taylor a little more settled than before: There is a romantic interest that tentatively seems to be working out, a bit of money in the bank, and he has the drinking under control for the most part. When bad stuff starts happening, only Taylor’s harshest critic could assign the responsibility to him—although it goes without saying that Taylor is his own harshest critic. One child is kidnapped and brutalized, another murdered, and a killer is on the rampage. Taylor knows who the culprit is and is powerless to do anything about it. But you can push Taylor only so far, and when he snaps, he’s gonna go bat%#@& crazy, which is the high point of Bruen’s books for most readers. Taut plotting, a staccato first-person narrative, deeply flawed yet sympathetic characters and the windy, wet Irish milieu conspire to put Bruen’s novels into a class by themselves.

This article was originally published in the November 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Occasionally an author’s estate or a publisher gets the idea to craft a prequel to a popular series, and Anthony Horowitz performs this duty for ace British spy James Bond in Forever and a Day. As the book opens, M (the big boss of MI6) is discussing the death of agent 007, which initially seems odd, as this is at the inception of Bond’s illustrious career. But it turns out that the 007 under discussion is the previous holder of that particular license-to-kill number, and Bond is quickly promoted to take on his predecessor’s responsibilities. His mission takes him to the south of France, where he engages the first of the legendary villains that will characterize the adventures of Bond’s later life. The book uses some source material from original Bond author Ian Fleming, and of all the Bond books that have come out since Fleming’s death, this one may hew closest to the originals. The racy English sports cars, check. The sultry femme fatale, check. The oversize (both in girth and in ego) villain, check. Oh, and here’s a bonus: For those who have ever wondered why Bond drinks his martinis shaken, not stirred, this book is where you will find the answer.

This article was originally published in the November 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Catriona McPherson successfully channels the mystery chops of Agatha Christie and the dialogue skills of Noël Coward (apologies for the dated references, but this book has that sort of feel about it) in her standalone psychological thriller Go to My Grave. Back in 1991, there was a Sweet 16-ish party at a Scottish manor house that had seen better days, and something seriously awful happened. Now in present day, whether by happenstance or by design, several of the 1991 revelers find themselves back at the same B & B, which has been restored and is virtually unrecognizable. The eight guests are all family members, by blood or by marriage. But there is bad blood—and bad marriage—on display here, and another something awful is poised to take place. I’m not giving anything away to say that even a newbie reader of suspense fiction will feel a Stephen King-esque prickle of menace as things start to get out of hand, and even the most jaded of suspense aficionados should be gobsmacked by the twist at the end.

This article was originally published in the November 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

When The Keeper of Lost Causes hit stands in the U.K.—where it was titled Mercy—the London Times called author Jussi Adler-Olsen “the new ‘it’ boy of Nordic Noir.” (I wish I had said that. . . .) Other reviewers threw around adjectives like “gripping,” “impressive” and “atmospheric.” Let me add a few more: “chilling,” “unsettling” and “downright disturbing.” When cranky detective Carl Morck returns to work after an assignment that went deadly wrong—in part thanks to him—the last thing he expects is a promotion. To his surprise, he is put in charge of Department Q, the cold-case unit of the Copenhagen police department. One such case is the disappearance of Merete Lynggard, once a leading light in the Social Democrats, missing for five years and presumed dead. But she is not dead—far from it. Can Morck find her, and perhaps find a morsel of redemption in the process? All you fans of Scandinavian mysteries (in my opinion some of the finest suspense novels in contemporary fiction): Be sure to grab this book now that it’s on sale in the U.S. You’ll thank me.
 

Fans new and old will celebrate George Pelecanos’ return to the ring with his latest novel, The Cut. A new Pelecanos hero has been brought into the fold, one Spero Lucas, a specialist in retrieving items deemed irretrievable by legal means. Lucas is an Iraq vet, world-weary at a young age and with a pragmatist’s view of the fine line of legality—a line he steps over with some regularity. Hired by an inmate to recover several packages of marijuana that have mysteriously gone missing, Lucas discovers that bent cops are in on the swiping of the drugs, not to mention the redistribution thereof. It goes without saying that they will pull out all the stops to keep Lucas at bay—murder included. You may want to keep a jargon dictionary on hand, as Pelecanos has perhaps the best ear in the business for contemporary street lingo, and he passes it on to the reader without editorial commentary. His writing is masterful, and The Cut deserves a place among his best work, which, as his legions of readers well know, is high praise indeed.

Arnaldur Indridason, the Icelandic author best known for his popular series featuring Reykjavik’s Inspector Erlendur, returns with a stand-alone thriller, Operation Napoleon. This tale of murder and intrigue has roots in wartime Berlin, half a continent (and half a century) away from the Icelandic glacier where the main plot will commence. The backstory, explained in a few introductory pages, is this: In 1945, a German bomber hastily repainted with American markings crashes in a snowstorm. Oddly, there are both German and American soldiers aboard. The glacier swallows up all traces, and there the story remains—frozen in time—for 50-some years. Credit global warming for bringing the airplane once again to the surface, thus stirring up the ashes of perhaps the biggest scandal in history, a secret that could potentially launch World War III. Leaning decidedly toward the thriller side of the thriller/mystery continuum, Operation Napoleon will nonetheless engage suspense devotees who, I guarantee, will be surprised and moved by the final twist.