In as little as 24 hours, your life can irrevocably change. Gilly Macmillan unflinchingly explores this reality in her second novel, The Perfect Girl. A year after publishing her bestselling, Edgar-nominated debut novel, What She Knew, Macmillan captivates readers with a story just as addictive as her first.

The titular “Perfect” girl is 17-year-old genius musician Zoe. Zoe and her mother, Maria, have been outcast from their former community after Zoe was found guilty of driving under the influence and killing three local teenagers, including her best friend. Maria has remarried into what is dubbed the “Second Chance Family,” which includes new husband Chris and his teenage son, Lucas, both oblivious to Zoe and Maria’s marred past. Their lives are intertwined with Sam, Zoe’s former lawyer; Tessa, Zoe’s aunt and Maria’s sister; and Richard, Tessa’s loving yet alcoholic husband.

The relationships in the “Second Chance Family” are fraught with secrets. Brooding Lucas is obviously carrying around the weight of his own past, while Maria maintains a precarious presentation of herself and Zoe to meet the expecations of suspiciously controlling Chris. When Maria is found dead, the thread holding everyone together unravels during the next 24 hours. Having already been institutionalized, Zoe fears she will become the prime suspect, but those closest to Maria and Zoe cannot be discounted as potential murderers.

Macmillan shines when exploring the intricacies of relationships, and the ties that bind this family are strained and complicated indeed. The story is told from the perspective of only three narrators: Zoe, Tessa and Sam. Yet through these lenses, we gain intimate insight into the other characters in whom we have become so invested. Macmillan adeptly demonstrates through her chosen method of storytelling that 24 hours can pass in what seems like a second—or a lifetime.

Macmillan has provided a follow-up novel possibly even better than her first, and fans of Tana French, Ruth Ware and Gillian Flynn will become completely entrenched in the unfolding details. 

Comparisons to Lee Child’s Jack Reacher are inevitable when considering many action thriller novels with larger-than-life heroes. But when Child himself makes note of it, you know the book at hand has got to be pretty damn good. Such is the case with Erik Storey’s debut novel, Nothing Short of Dying. In a prominent book cover blurb, Child says: “Reacher is keeping an eye on this guy.” And so should you.

The novel follows loner Clyde Barr—adventurer, soldier and most recently an unjustly imprisoned convict—as he attempts to blend into his Utah countryside and escape the burdens of humanity. But as fate would have it, he receives a desperate call for help from his estranged sister Jen and must drop everything to come to her aid.

With the help of plucky bartender Allie and some rather unsavory former associates, Clyde quickly tracks his sister’s whereabouts to a mountain hideaway in Colorado where she is being kept prisoner by a ruthless criminal. Clyde boldly mounts a rescue operation with his sidekicks, resulting in an explosive exchange of gunfire and fisticuffs. The rugged countryside lends itself well to the story, creating a bleak, rugged landscape for Clyde to play in, like a classic Western showdown.

Storey doesn’t pull any punches with his crisp, in-your-face dialogue and vivid action, and neither does his hero. Clyde’s sense of commitment to his sister is both emotional and inspirational as he confronts seemingly impossible odds. Jack Reacher would be proud.

If there’s anyone out there still lamenting the absence of Elmore Leonard’s “Justified” on TV, you can get your fix of small-town Kentucky criminals in Jesse Donaldson’s debut thriller, The More They Disappear. The novel starts with the shocking assassination of longtime Kentucky Sheriff Lew Mattock at his own re-election campaign barbecue and quickly escalates into a thrilling manhunt for his killer.

Chief Deputy Harlan Dupee steps up as acting sheriff to investigate the shooting, following a trail of dark secrets amid the townsfolk he only thought he knew. Along the way he discovers his former boss wasn’t as upstanding a lawman as he believed. At the root of everything is a prescription drug trade that has its hooks in everyone, from the town’s most innocent children to even its most prominent citizens.

Donaldson keeps the plot moving at a swift pace, adding more mystery and a growing list of suspects with each chapter. Thrown into the mix is whether Dupee should seek to run for election when Mattock’s own son, Lewis, also intends to win his father’s badge.

The novel works on a number of levels and should appeal to a broad swath of readers, whether you’re looking for an action-filled genre story or an introspective study of how addiction and poverty can lead to absolute corruption, lies, and shattered dreams. Dupee’s deeply moral sense of right and wrong and his doubts as to the effectiveness of the law add a layer of sophistication and rumination to an otherwise straightforward whodunit.

Donaldson writes with authority on the Kentucky hill country, as he was both born and raised in the bluegrass state. His writing has appeared in The Oxford American, Crazyhorse and other magazines.

Edie is in her 30s, lives alone, works as a waitress and is pregnant. Hers is an unremarkable life, except for the horrific secret she keeps buried in her past. Edie has all but erased that moment by cutting off contact with her mother, moving far from her sleepy hometown and, most importantly, not speaking with Heather—her best friend who was also involved—for 17 years. But when Edie suffers from severe postpartum depression, she becomes physically incapable of caring for the baby. When Heather unexpectedly appears at Edie’s side, offering to move in and help with little Maya, Edie knows that for the sake of her daughter, she cannot refuse. As she emerges from the haze of her depression, her fears return. What does Heather want, and why has she returned after all this time?

A teenage Heather narrates passages that take place before the incident, while Edie recounts chapters occurring in the present. As the narrative voices alternate, the reader’s loyalty to Edie waxes and wanes. Present-day Edie has lost some of her spark; she is more reserved than her teenage self, but is kind and intelligent. Her fear of Heather is absolute and visceral, and author Camilla Way adeptly transfers this paranoia to the page and the reader. But high school-aged Heather is also a sympathetic character. Awkward and anxious, her devotion to beautiful, confident Edie is understandable. Heather’s strangeness and unpopularity are skillfully written as pathetic yet relatable.

Way proves to be an expert at setting narrative traps, providing enough information for readers to make inferences and assumptions, but stealthily holding back the key elements as long as possible. While much psychological suspense has focused on spousal relationships, Watching Edie thoughtfully explores female friendships and betrayal. A compelling voice in suspense fiction, Way keeps readers guessing throughout this smart, taut psychological thriller.

The word “shine” takes on a whole new meaning in Collecting the Dead, a debut thriller by Spencer Kope, who brings street cred as a crime analyst for a county sheriff’s office in Washington state and a former intelligence operations specialist for Naval Intelligence.

The shine in this book manifests solely to Magnus Craig, part of a special FBI tracking team concerned with missing persons. Craig has a special ability, almost a second sight, enabling him to read traces left behind at a scene by any person, whether in footsteps or handprints. Craig doesn’t need special lighting techniques to pick up a person’s shine, it’s an invisible gift—or curse—that allows him to pick up the slightest evidence unaided, each one sticking out, he says, like a “neon billboard.”

This odd but crucial ability is known to only a few people, including Craig’s partner, Jimmy, and the two have perfected their own way of working with mainstream law enforcement, adding a layer of scientific patter to their distinctly unscientific tracking abilities that would hardly be admissible in court.

In Collecting the Dead, the first in a series, Craig and his team search for a serial killer who kidnaps and kills young women, leaving behind his own special signature—a line drawing of a frowning face, with eyes, nose and down-turned mouth, left at each crime scene, unmistakably colored (for Craig) with the killer’s individual shine. The race is on to find and save some of Sad Face’s kidnap victims before it’s too late.

Craig seems to possess a formidable skill, but he obsesses about his failure to locate many of the missing in time to save their lives, and he suffers nightmares or insomnia with each person lost. He can’t help keeping albums containing photos of those he’s found, with a grimmer version cataloguing those that were never located. The team’s unspoken motto, “We save the ones we can,” seems to be the mantra that keeps them going.

The narrative is speckled with insider info about the FBI’s forensic skills and methods of operation. The author has mastered a conversational, dryly humorous tone that works well, and it usually—though not always—compensates for his tendency for over-wordiness.

Just when you think you’re home-free, though, the author leaves a new killer lurking in the wings, ready for tracking in the next installment.

Getting or becoming a new roommate is a spin on the lottery wheel of life. Sometimes you hit the jackpot, and sometimes you lose everything. Quinn Collins can’t believe how lucky she is to have Esther as her roommate. Sure, one time Esther became practically feral when Quinn borrowed her spices without asking. And if she’s a bit bossy, it’s only because she has Quinn’s best interests at heart, right?

Until the night Esther disappears, Quinn thinks she’s just a wonderful person and even fondly calls her Saint Esther. However, as Quinn searches for clues to Esther's unexplained departure, she uncovers disturbing facts that make her rethink all her previous impressions of Esther. Not content to idly wait the police-recommended 72 hours before searching for a missing person, Quinn scours Esther's room, only to find an ominous letter signed by EV, her roommate’s initials. The note is a love letter of sorts to a mystery person, but includes stalker-like content. Quinn also discovers that Esther advertised for a new roommate—a replacement for her. Saddened, she enlists the aid of a mutual friend to help her solve the mysteries surrounding Esther's disappearance and the facts behind the letter.

Another plotline develops when a strange young woman arrives in a town about an hour away from the girls’ apartment. Told by an adolescent obsessed with the new arrival, readers assume the girl must be Esther—or is she?

In her third novel, Don’t You Cry, Mary Kubica follows a trajectory of warmth, suspense and fear. Her skill as an author is apparent in this novel that successfully aligns opposing attributes and astonishes readers with multilayered intrigue. Readers take a sinister tour of family and personal dynamics in this tortuous, well-tempered novel of suspense.

You won’t want to close the book on this one. The new thriller by Michael Robotham, Close Your Eyes, is reason to stay up late.

Clinical psychologist Joseph O’Laughlin is reluctant to once again take on the role of detective—after seven previous adventures, he thought he’d given it up to live out a peaceful retirement—but when a former student, Milo Coleman, calling himself “the Mindhunter,” begins to jeopardize the police investigation, he can no longer stand by idly. With his reputation in danger, Joe sets out to smooth over the ruffled feathers of the police and to calm a groundswell of public anger over the brutal unsolved murders of a mother and her teenage daughter.

Joe soon discovers why police are having such a difficult time as a bevy of suspects, each with possible motives and opportunity, present themselves in the case. The further his investigation carries him, the more dark secrets and potential victims of a ruthless criminal come to light, giving rise to a possible serial murderer in the town’s midst.

The mystery and suspense is reason enough to keep reading, but Robotham ups the ante with a rousing family drama that adds an emotional complication to his lead’s life. Joe, who already must deal with his own bout of Parkinson’s disease, learns his former wife has cancer and must undergo surgery, leaving him to care for his two young daughters. Perhaps unwisely, he even takes his eldest daughter, teenager Charlie, under his wing while investigating the murders.

Robotham drafts brilliantly descriptive passages that paint vivid scenes and sweep readers along in the narrative. It’s easy to sympathize with Joe both in the course of his investigation, and more importantly, in his family life.

The entire novel comes cascading down to a thrilling climax and reveal of the true villain in typical Robotham fashion.

Maya Stern was a firsthand witness to her husband’s brutal murder by a pair of thieves, so how is it possible that he would be seen days later, playing with her two-year-old daughter, on footage captured by a nanny cam? Finding the answer, and perhaps even her husband, propels the riveting narrative of Harlan Coben’s new thriller, Fool Me Once.

When the picture card inside the nanny cam goes missing, Maya has no evidence to back up what she saw, and anyone she tells is more than reluctant to believe her. But Maya, a former Army captain with plenty of command experience, isn’t one to just let things go. She naturally takes it upon herself to get to the truth, following a trail of clues past and present, uncovering new twists in the puzzle along the way.

Coben’s mastery as a first-class storyteller is evident from the opening pages as we meet Maya at her husband’s funeral, still dazed and overwhelmed by feelings of grief and loss. Readers can easily sympathize with Maya and embrace her as she reels from one tragedy to the incredible event of seeing her husband alive again on the nanny cam.

With readers hooked, Coben steers the narrative with a methodical slow build, as Maya retraces her husband’s past to a pair of previous deaths going back to his college days, while uncovering a slew of family secrets. Through Maya, readers are forced to ponder just how much you really know about someone and how far they’ll go to blind themselves to the truth.

Maya’s journey comes to an unexpected climax as Coben unravels a patented twist, making the methodical investigation of the book worth the wait.

Fool Me Once is the first of Coben’s 25 novels to be told entirely from the perspective of a female protagonist, resulting in a new experience for longtime fans and an excellent jumping-on point for new readers.

Words can hurt, and in the case of Owen Laukkanen’s compelling, thought-provoking new thriller, The Watcher in the Wall, they can be enough to kill.

Laukkenen’s recurring FBI agents Kirk Stevens and Carla Windermere pursue an Internet troll who encourages fragile teenagers to commit suicide, while recording their final moments via webcam for a black market on the dark web. The case takes on a deeper meaning for Windermere, who continues to berate herself over a past mistake in which she stood by as a fellow classmate was bullied in school to the point she one day never came back. Catching the predator in this case serves as a chance, however slight, for redemption. Interestingly, in the acknowledgements, Laukkanen admits he also dealt with depression and suicidal thoughts as a teenager, making the book even more deeply personal.

Laukkenen’s fast-paced prose and short chapters pull readers along on a cross-country pursuit to identify the predator behind the online suicide forum and stop him before he can rack up more victims. They encounter numerous technological roadblocks along the way and must rely on help from the FBI’s crack technology team to penetrate the suspect’s cybertrail.

Laukkenen based the novel in part on the real-life case of William Melchert-Dinkel, a Minnesota man whose online “encouragement” drove an Ottawa teen to commit suicide in 2009, and who is suspected of entering into fake suicide pacts with at least five other victims. If parents were afraid of whom their impressionable kids are socializing with online before, they will only be more wary after reading this eerily timely and poignant book.

Readers of Laukkanen’s earlier novels in the FBI series, including The Professionals and The Stolen Ones, need not worry that the case is a mask for social commentary, however. It’s a true page-turner up to the final act, which quickly escalates into a fiery exchange of gunfire and action-packed pursuit of the perp.

Running away from your problems isn’t the best option. Plenty of people, real and imagined, have tried and failed. The problems, however serious or minute they may be, always seem to catch up with them in the end.

No one apparently told that to Tanya/Amelia/Debra/Emma/Sonia/Paige/Jo/Nora, the narrator in The Passenger, the latest thrilling novel from Lisa Lutz, an Edgar Award nominee and the New York Times bestselling author of the Spellman Files series. Try as she might, Lutz’s “gone girl” sheds one identity for another in rapid succession, hoping to find one that will stick and offer her a chance to begin again. Part of the fun of the novel is trying to figure out who she really is.

Unfortunately for Lutz’s main character, her past secrets and misdeeds constantly nip at her heels. Just when it appears she’s about to find some semblance of peace, something or someone threatens to undo everything and expose her. Whether it’s a flimsy backstory, a forged driver’s license or a persistent detective on her trail, before long, she’s on the run again.

Admit it—we’ve all wanted a chance for a do-over at some point in our lives. Readers will know the choices the protagonist is making are wrong, but the thrill of the chase, and perhaps the promise of it all crashing down in the end, will keep them turning the pages and rooting for her just the same. That’s a credit to Lutz’s deft storytelling, as she’s able to goad readers into sympathizing with her narrator while baiting them with just enough clues to foster doubt in her truthfulness. After all, and as Lutz’s narrator points out right from the outset, “I don’t have an alibi, so you’ll have to take my word for it.”