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.”

The Singing Bone, the debut spine-chiller from Beth Hahn, is a concoction of sophistication and surprise. The book takes readers into the heart of the charismatic and sinister Jack Wyck and his cult-like coterie of young followers, presenting an unsparing look at the unsettling power of its manipulative leader. 

In the 1970s, a small group of teens fall under Wyck’s spell, and chapters alternate between the young people as we first meet them and some of those same characters 20 years later, after the terrible deeds have long been done. While flashbacks in fiction can often seem superficial or confusing, Hahn has used the technique here with great success, as the cumulative effect of the years becomes clear in her extraordinary telling. As the chilling Wyck holds the group in thrall, little by little readers come to understand the tragic extent of his mesmerizing influence and ability to shape the young minds he holds in an unrelenting grip.

Sometimes hard to read but always riveting in detail and nuance, The Singing Bone begins with 17-year-old Alice Pearson as she falls under Wyck’s spell along with friends Molly, Stover and Trina. They join Wyck’s bizarre household, one that already includes a wily young man named Lee and an enigmatic woman named Allegra—who may be either a victim or an accomplice. They appear to aid Wyck as he unrolls schemes to defraud innocent families whose soldier sons are missing in the Vietnam conflict.

The early years center on issues within the group, as members of the “household” vie for Wyck’s affections and a prime place, literally, in his bed. Horrific evidence begins to surface that Wyck’s deceptions and trickery have been used many times before, with similar tragic consequences. Years later, Wyck’s surviving victims struggle to gain a semblance of normality in their lives, while Wyck sits in prison awaiting parole, still exerting an uncanny ability to control from behind bars.

Near the end, a researcher looking into the past events imagines one person who might “leave the house, abandon Jack Wyck, return to his own life—but he knows that magic doesn’t exist. The images of freedom won’t save the boy.” Hahn’s prose, simple and never overdone, underlines the dramatic and lasting consequences of all that was surrendered.

What would you do if you were Yasmin, a brainy London astrophysicist, and your filmmaker husband was missing and presumed dead after a tragic accident in northern Alaska, where the frigid air and deepest black of night reduce survival odds to near zero? Author Rosamund Lupton offers up one frightening scenario in The Quality of Silence, a tight, claustrophobic thriller that will enclose readers in a world of cold from which there’s no escape.

The Alaskan authorities have unsuccessfully tried to convince Yasmin that her husband, Matt, is dead, and they’re calling off their search in the remote village of Anaktue, 200 miles north in the Alaska wilds where Matt was last staying. What’s more, his wedding ring has been found in the burned-out wreckage of this Eskimo settlement where a terrible explosion has wiped the place clean of anything that lives.

To those of us comfortably ensconced in our easy chairs, Yasmin’s response may seem crazy. She has no one she trusts to stay with her 10-year-old daughter, Ruby, who’s been deaf since birth, so against all reason, she and Ruby set out into the silent, endless snow in search of Matt, in the teeth of a blinding storm.

Nature, however, is not the only enemy. Anaktue is also at the center of activity for hydraulic fracturing mega-companies and big-money natural gas interests, and some very powerful human adversaries are out to stop Yasmin from reaching the village. And who, besides a long-distance trucker or two, is willing to help her?

The author evokes a sense of absolute isolation that hovers at the edge of every scene. It’s the perfect metaphor for Ruby’s world of deafness, as mother and daughter find themselves marooned in the cab of a big rig truck, where headlights beating into the wall of snow make only a small bubble of light, and where even a voice on the radio seems like a reprieve. The youngster’s unique perspective often propels the narrative: “Sometimes you see a small sign in our headlights, and it’s just an arrow pointing right or pointing left and that means Mum knows to turn the steering wheel, otherwise we might just drive off into the sky.”

Lupton uses powerful, evocative language to craft a literary novel that sets a knife-edge of danger on every page, as readers follow mother and daughter through the forbidding landscape to a heart-stopping conclusion.

BookPage Fiction Top Pick, March 2016

On a bleak, harsh winter afternoon in Chosen, a small town in upstate New York, local art history professor George Clare comes home to find his 3-year-old daughter, Franny, hiding in fear and his wife, Catherine, murdered. George becomes the chief suspect, and the investigation turns up details about his personal life—secret relationships, temper issues, a disintegrating marriage—that cast his innocence in doubt for everyone but his closest family. Still, the police investigating remain unable to pin his wife’s murder on George, and the crime goes unsolved for decades.

Death seems to hang over Chosen; the town is rural, close-knit and poor, with a dark history—the Clares’ own house was the site of a suicide not long before the family moved in. The community struggles not only to understand who killed Catherine, but also how and why. Years will pass—and Franny Clare will have to return to her childhood home, now long abandoned—before any justice is found.

In her third novel, Elizabeth Brundage, who has an MFA from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, combines a classic murder mystery with a gripping psychological thriller, exploring the complexities of grief, relationships—romantic, familial and friendly—and small-town life. All Things Cease to Appear is a smart, original take on the mystery genre, with nuanced depictions of rural New York, the people who inhabit it and the secrets they keep.

This article was originally published in the March 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Fiona Barton’s slippery debut is a top-notch addition to the growing field of psychological thrillers starring untrustworthy female characters, such as The Girl on the Train and Gone Girl.

In the first chapter, readers learn a possible kidnapper and child molester is dead. Four years earlier, he was accused and tried for the disappearance of 2-year-old Bella Elliot, but found not guilty—in the legal sense. All of England was riveted to the trial, and the court of popular opinion considered him guilty. Now, in a freak accident, he has been run over by a bus and killed. In the immediate aftermath of his death, reporter Kate Waters seeks to interview his vulnerable widow, a woman who sometimes seems to know more than she’s letting on.

The intensity of the story comes from the three people who each share their perspectives of the events, as chapters alternate between the widow, the reporter and the detective assigned to solve the missing child case. Each telling takes up where the previous chapter left off, creating a continuous, intriguing storyline. These brilliantly crafted, revolving narratives form a realistic thriller that compels readers to continue reading, just as the detective compulsively continues to probe the case.

Readers will question what the widow knows—and when she first knew it. Through the three-pronged narrative, The Widow examines the depths of what spouses really know about each other and how they respond to each other’s needs. It also serves as a cautionary tale of Internet exposure.

Crime novelist Elmore Leonard once said writers should “try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.” That’s advice Scott Frank clearly takes to heart in his debut novel, Shaker. Frank captures the underbelly of Los Angeles’ streets to perfection with sharply written prose and biting dialogue. There are no wasted words here, as right from the start things take an unexpected turn and the complications begin to multiply for main character Roy Cooper.

Cooper isn’t the sort of character readers expect or want to spend a lot of time with—he’s a killer on a mission, ruthless and efficient. But in typical Leonard fashion, Frank takes Cooper from unlikable killer to sympathetic loner. Sent to jail as a kid to protect his mother and baby brother, Cooper grows up fast in prison under the tutelage of fellow inmate/mentor Albert Budin, who continues to play an influence in his life long after their release from prison.

Cooper’s on a job to kill a money-skimming accountant in sunny LA when he stumbles into a back-alley mugging by four teenage gangbangers. Though he’s unable to save the victim of the gang’s assault, his efforts instantly garner him media status as a hero. This attention to his deeds works against him, however, as the gang sets out for revenge, a nosy detective suspects Cooper’s not all he appears to be and Cooper’s old mentor, Budin, is sent to clean up his mess.

Best known for his screenplays Little Man Tate, Minority Report, The Interpreter, Marley & Me and The Wolverine, Frank collaborated with Leonard on both Out of Sight and Get Shorty. In Shaker, Frank deftly blends action with flashbacks that allow us to get close to these characters and learn their motivations and flaws. The result is a richly layered crime story that is at times moving, humorous and, more often than not, violently bloody.

Bestselling author Thomas Perry loves plans, escapes and perfect getaways. He also has a low-key, sardonic sense of humor and is a master at creating witty and likable thieves that we end up rooting for, often over the more straight-and-narrow option. All of these keystones are in place in Perry’s most recent standalone thriller, Forty Thieves—and there are at least that many iffy characters tumbling around in this winning novel.

One year has passed since the body of research scientist James Ballantine was found stuffed in a storm drain, and the crime has gone unsolved. Enter two husband/wife teams, each hired for separate reasons connected with the case. Private detectives and former LAPD cops Sid and Ronnie Abel are hired by Ballantine’s former employers to pick up the dropped threads of the earlier investigation and to search out the killer. Ed and Nicole Hoyt are skilled assassins hired by a middleman to stop the Abels from completing their assignment.

Perry is skilled at developing the backstories of this at-odds quartet, and readers may find their sympathies meandering all over the place. All four are handy with their weaponry, and the good guy/bad guy labels may get a bit murky at times. Also, there’s another picturesque gang behind the Ed/Nicole hire, and readers may grow to like them, too: a bunch of Russian diamond thieves who really just want to retire quietly in southern California after an exhausting career.

For all who’ve never read a Perry novel, an unforgettable experience awaits. The author cuts the hyperbole and offers blow-by-blow descriptions of a series of game plans as they’re activated and carried out with varying degrees of success. The writing is spare, literal and droll at the same time, often reminiscent of the late Donald Westlake’s intrigues with his steely Parker and comic Dortmunder characters.

Forty Thieves is an adrenaline rush, as fast-moving vehicles crisscross like searchlights arcing across an urban night sky, as Ed, Nicole, Sid and Ronnie engage in their exciting game of search and destroy. As for the victim whose murder started the whole thing off, he may be the character you’ll end up liking least of all. And it may not be giving too much away to say that to work it all out, it’s “cherchez la femme” from start to finish.

Vincent Zandri captures readers’ attention from the opening scene of his new suspense novel, Orchard Grove, and proceeds to careen through lust and lives. Lana, as a young girl, brutally slays her stepfather who has been sexually abusing her for months. In an unusual twist, Lana relishes the power she experiences when she kills him, and he becomes the first of many men she murders throughout her life.

Fast forward about 36 years, and Lana returns to the bucolic area near Albany, New York, where her murderous spree occurred. Now, however, she’s bored, is married to a police detective and has a proclivity for topless sunbathing. Her neighbor, has-been Hollywood writer Ethan Forrester, stares at her from his bedroom window and fantasizes about a relationship with her. As his fantasy becomes a reality, the story charges up and down a razor’s edge of tension and seduction.

Ethan’s obsession with Lana only increases after they have sex, and he puts their marriages, his welfare and his sanity on the line. Meanwhile, Lana also exerts her mesmerizing sexual powers over Ethan’s wife. The Forresters recognize the havoc Lana is wreaking on their marriage, but Lana’s allure is impossible for them to resist. So when Lana devises a diabolical plan and needs Ethan’s help to execute it, he ignores his better judgement and agrees to her scheme, forever altering the course of his, his wife and Lana’s lives.

While the characters don’t have many redeeming qualities, Zandri manages to create a likable persona in Ethan for whom readers can root while head-smacking him for his stupidity. The sheer audacity of the violence and sex in the novel creates a story that, much like the Forresters' obsession with Lana, is hard to tear away from once a reader is hooked.

British author Charles Lambert’s latest, The Children’s Home, is like a strange dream in which you can’t quite tell if you’re awake. Morgan, its disfigured, 20-something protagonist, lives isolated in his powerful family’s sprawling home. His estranged sister sent a housekeeper to live with him, and soon after, children began arriving. They appear with no backstory—one, in fact, materializes out of thin air—and Morgan and the housekeeper, Engel, become parents of sorts. The resulting story is a weird, poignant journey reminiscent of Calvino that explores fear, power, revenge and redemption.

When one of the children falls ill, Dr. Crane enters the scene. He befriends the young hermit and becomes a fixture at the house. When government agents arrive inquiring about rumors of “strays” living there, Crane speaks for Morgan, who is afraid to let strangers see his face. As Morgan and Crane observe strange, sometimes frightening, behaviors in the children, eerily related discoveries are made in attic trunks and in Morgan’s grandfather’s books. Eventually, circumstances force Morgan to balance his fear of being seen against his concern for the children’s safety.

Lambert’s story is addictive, although readers looking for concrete answers to its riddles may be disappointed. But while the book leaves many mysteries intact, its potent, often brutal, images have a lasting power. Things feel just a notch off in this world, like a walk through a quietly disturbing dream. It stays with you after, like that dream, trying to tell you something gravely important.

This article was originally published in the January 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.