K.T. Medina’s debut novel, White Crocodile, is a harrowing venture into the deadly fields of Cambodia, a Southeast Asian nation of volatile politics, poverty and danger. The author is a former member of the British armed forces, well qualified to describe the conditions in that small country where, in the 1970s, hostile political groups planted thousands of land mines that have victimized the native population to the present day.

After five years of experience in the British Royal Engineers, including three tours of duty clearing mines in Afghanistan, Tess Hardy has joined the humanitarian mine clearance charity MCT in Cambodia’s Battambang Province. Her secret agenda, known only to herself, is to discover what happened to her ex-husband, Luke, who was reported killed while searching out unexploded mines with MCT, but whose body was never recovered. Luke physically abused Tess during their marriage, but drew her back into his orbit during a disturbing phone call to her shortly before his death. Just after Tess arrives in Cambodia, she watches as another of Luke’s colleagues, an experienced mine clearer, is severely injured by a mine. Are these accidents—or murder?

Threading through this unnerving tale is the image of a White Crocodile, carved on doorways and homes and appearing on signposts in the minefields strewn with lethal weapons, fields that the fearsome crocodile appears to stalk on his killing missions. The creature is a symbol of death, connected to an old legend that intimidates the population into near passivity—or violent revenge. The White Crocodile is also blamed for a spate of disappearances and related killings in local villages, always of young single mothers whose deaths leave their small children without home and family. The story clicks at another level as readers learn these events may be related to the murder of a young Cambodian woman, oceans away in England. Tess, in uneasy alliance with Alex, a Croatian mine clearer with violent tendencies of his own, vows to defy the myth of the crocodile’s menace and uncover the mystery behind the disappearances and deaths.

The danger of unexploded mines in the Cambodian fields serves as a frightening symbol of the brutality that victimizes the terrified, closemouthed populace and throws into sharp relief the political agencies sent to aid villagers—groups that often inspire the very forces that victimize.

White Crocodile is an arresting, disturbing and memorable read.

RELATED CONTENT: Go Behind the Book with author K.T. Medina.

Does a spy thriller written by a former CIA officer offer an unbiased view of the world of espionage? Who knows, but it seems the answer may be both yes and no.

Former CIA spook and burgeoning author Jason Matthews has an amazing feel for the insider lingo and relentless intrigue of the spy’s life. Palace of Treason, the second book in his series (following his debut, Red Sparrow), is a harrowing look into the lives of spies, including a CIA rookie named Nate and a gorgeous Russian intelligence operative named Dominika Egorova, who lives the precarious existence of a double agent, spying for the U.S. while maintaining her Russian cover.

On the other hand, this wealth of technical knowledge—and a breathtaking sense that the author’s been out in the field himself—at times produces an overdone, good-guy-bad-guy inflection that can be off-putting. In Matthews’ world, nearly all Russians are self-serving, smug and boorish, while the white hats in the CIA are “smooth and professional . . .  strong and reliable.” In this day and age it’s hard to believe that the double-dealing, crafty self-interest and sadism are so completely one-sided, and this tendency shadows what is an otherwise riveting narrative.

Matthews’ intricate plot follows Dominika the mole as she seeks to undermine and botch Russia’s efforts to encourage Iran’s nuclear enrichment program. She passes critical information to the CIA, always a half step away from discovery—there’s also an enemy mole operating inside the CIA who’s about to unmask and destroy Dominika, and each page brings that agent one move closer to proving her a traitor to Mother Russia.

Nate and Dominika maintain a hot love affair, adding to the tension and possibility that either may make a mission-destroying decision. The book offers up other, stranger bedfellows as well. Palace contains marvelous descriptions of murky, offbeat characters, as well as a disconcerting central role for Vladimir Putin that seems misplaced in this narrative full of otherwise fictional types.

This is stay-up-all-night reading, and we’re pummeled by hair-trigger actions on every page. There’s a striking sense that no one seems to win for long. It’s a world in which victories and setbacks follow each other hard and fast, in a game where both missions and lives are destroyed in an instant.

A powerful read from an impressive new voice, Freedom’s Child is an intricate portrait of a crass, swears-like-a-sailor woman who has lost everything and is fueled by an unabated fervor to find her daughter.

Contrary to her name, Freedom feels trapped, even though she’s on the other side of the country and a decade removed from her former life. Labeled as the promiscuous town drunk in a small Oregon community, she finds herself waxing in and out of suicidal thoughts. This isn’t what she wanted for her life, but it’s what she was assigned by the Witness Protection detail. The alcohol and self-inflicted psychological abuse serve as her own punishment for letting her life get so lurid.

Freedom’s shaken from this sluggish state when she hears news of Michael Delaney’s release from jail—and then silence from her estranged daughter’s Facebook page. She has to find her daughter before they do—the Delaney Boys, those Mastic Beach miscreants, her brothers-in-law. They’re out to get Freedom any way they can, because of what she did or what she was accused of, and what she would gladly let happen again if given the chance: the murder of her husband. Thus begins Freedom’s cross-country road trip to redemption and to clear the debt she’s harbored for 20 years. Along the way she encounters new and old friends who help her discover the person she should have been all this time.

Visceral and brazen, Jax Miller’s debut is an engrossingly raw exposé of one woman’s reparation, knotted with storylines from the dirty underbelly of biker bars, Native American legends, religious cults and one shocking plot twist you’ll never see coming. Congratulations to Miller for a standout first novel. You’ll read nothing like it!

“I was too angry to take my own life,” muses the protagonist of Sharon Bolton’s Little Black Lies. “Unless, of course, I could take Rachel’s first.” Readers expecting a conventionally likable heroine may be taken aback by Catrin Quinn, a woman too consumed by grief to feel much empathy for anyone around her. Catrin is a wildlife conservation expert in the Falkland Islands, a remote 2,000-person settlement in the south Atlantic. Until three years ago, she was a married mother of two. Then her best friend, Rachel, left her sons unattended in a car by the side of a cliff, allowing them to roll to their deaths.  

The tragedy ended Catrin’s marriage, as well as her affair with sexy ex-soldier Callum Murphy. It also left Catrin bitter, hopeless and preoccupied with revenge. When a visiting tourist’s young son goes missing, joining in the search brings her anguish even closer to the surface. She believes the child simply wandered away from his parent and drowned—but this is the third such disappearance in three years, and islanders are starting to wonder if there could be a killer in their midst. Then Rachel’s son disappears, and Catrin’s neighbors start to wonder if that killer might be her.

Lies evokes the wild landscape of the Falklands—a place where whale and seal sightings are common, wrecked ships lurk just off the coast and abandoned mines from the ’80s-era war still pose a threat. It also deftly portrays the mental states of its three narrators: Catrin; Callum, the ex-lover who still hopes to win her back; and Rachel, the accidental killer who uses pills and alcohol to numb her guilt. Each is deeply damaged and difficult to love, but this fast-paced and expertly plotted thriller forces readers to question whether any of them are capable of murder.

In the chilling opening of Stephen King’s Finders Keepers, a sequel to his 2014 bestseller Mr. Mercedes, three words jolt elderly literary lion John Rothstein from a sound sleep, alerting him to the fact that he’s become the victim of a home invasion: “Wake up, genius.”

But these aren’t just any robbers. They’re led by Rothstein’s biggest (and baddest) fan, small-time criminal Morris Bellamy. Morris is unhappy that Rothstein has gone decades without publishing a new Jimmy Gold book (think John Updike’s Rabbit series), and he definitely doesn’t like that, in the last published novel, nonconformist Gold sold out to climb the corporate ladder at an advertising agency.

Morris kills Rothstein, stealing his money and his stash of notebooks—which, unbeknownst to him, include two more Jimmy Gold novels. But Morris is arrested for a different crime the next day, and the money and the notebooks are left to languish in a hiding place near his childhood home.

Fast-forward 35 years, and teenager Pete Saubers stumbles upon Morris’ treasure. The money comes in handy—Pete’s father is in chronic pain after being injured in the Center City Massacre, and the family is struggling financially due to medical bills and lost income—but the notebooks capture Pete’s imagination. Over the years, he falls in love with literature thanks to the story of Jimmy Gold. But when Morris is released from prison and realizes his hiding place has been discovered, Pete becomes his next target. 

Luckily, police detective Bill Hodges and his sidekicks, college student Jerome and tech-savvy but socially awkward Holly, who starred in Mr. Mercedes, are on the case, thanks to a call from Pete’s little sister, Tina, who’s worried about his strange behavior. 

At least one more novel featuring Hodges and the Center City Massacre victims is in the works. But the new characters shine as well: Pete is a worthy addition to King’s roster of memorable teen characters. He’s smart, brave and fiercely loyal to his family, especially Tina, but doesn’t always have the experience to make the right calls when it counts. Morris, on the other hand, is the sort of cold, calculating villain who will haunt your dreams. He’s spent decades waiting for those notebooks, and nothing is going to keep him from reading them.

King has long been interested in literary obsessions, and the divide between author and fan or creator and creation—think Misery, The Dark Half or Secret Window, Secret Garden. Finders Keepers continues to explore these ideas and adds another dimension: Pete and Morris are both willing to do a lot to hold on to Rothstein’s works. At what point does the hero become the villain? 

Readers will find themselves pondering this question and others at the close of this accomplished thriller.

It’s difficult to imagine anything more traumatic than a child’s death. But when the deceased child is a twin, the living sibling can be a constant reminder of what’s lost.

That’s the case for Sarah Moorcroft, whose twin daughters were so perfectly identical that Sarah and her husband Angus relied on the girls’ word and personalities to determine who was who. Lydia and Kirstie were born on the coldest day of the year, earning them the nickname “the ice twins,” which was borne out by their blonde hair, blue eyes and pale skin.

After Lydia dies in a fall, each family member’s sorrow reveals itself in different ways. Angus gets into a work argument that leaves him unemployed with a London-sized mortgage. Sarah struggles to get along with her husband and find work of her own. Most disturbingly, Kirstie begins claiming that she’s actually Lydia, and that Kirstie is the twin who died.

The family seeks a new start—and a less expensive lifestyle—on a Scottish island Angus inherited. Sarah is determined to put their lives back together as they live in and restore a squalid, barely inhabitable lighthouse, the island’s only structure. And if that means learning that the couple buried the wrong twin, well, Sarah is convinced they can move forward. 

In The Ice Twins, S.K. Tremayne depicts a family as isolated as the tiny isle they call home. Sarah, Angus and Kirstie (or is it Lydia?) have separated themselves from one another and their normal lives. They’re left metaphorically circling one another warily, trying to deduce what’s going on inside. 

As the Moorcrofts aim to unravel what, exactly, happened when one twin died, readers are given glimpses into each character’s thoughts. The resulting tale, written by a best-selling author under a pseudonym, peels back one layer at a time in a fast-paced, thrilling race to understanding.

This article was originally published in the June 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

There seems to be no reason behind the string of teen suicides in the rural English village of Radcote. A young man dies in a strange motorcycle accident, quickly followed by the death of another boy. But were these really suicides, or were they murders? Perhaps these unexplained teen deaths are connected to the cluster of apparent suicides that occurred in the same community two years ago.

In her new psychological thriller, What You Left Behind, author Samantha Hayes creates a town where suspicion and grief have settled on the community like a cloud that won’t disperse. She effectively conveys a sense of creepy urgency in her cast of odd characters that includes Gil, a young man with undisclosed “issues” who’s given to peeking in windows; the mousy Sophia, who manages the homeless shelter in town and whose son was counted among the earlier suicide victims; and Frank, a menacing, rank-smelling regular in town and at the shelter.

Detective Inspector Lorraine Fisher arrives in Radcote for a vacation week with her sister, Jo. She arrives with her daughter, Stella, driving down “Devil’s Mile,” the road to her sister’s house, where flowers mark the site of the recent motorcycle tragedy. Fisher can’t help getting involved: Her creds as a cop make her hyper-aware of the strange circumstances that surround the so-called suicides, and her attention increases after her preteen daughter visits a local estate and horse farm and encounters Gil.

Meanwhile Jo worries about her 18-year-old son, Freddie, who suddenly loses interest in school and begins to disappear into his room for hours at a time. What’s happening to Freddie is key: He’s afraid to tell his family that frightening email messages on his laptop are delivering insinuations, demands and terrors that won’t go away. Sure, he thinks, “He could leave home, struggle to establish a new life somewhere. But one thing was for certain: wherever he went, cyberspace would go with him.”

Hayes knows how to ratchet up the suspense and the questions, including who’s behind the scary events—and why? She subtly magnifies the sense of foreboding that pervades both characters and setting. And this just may be one of those spine-chillers where not all of the loose ends will get tidied away.

In his second novel, Christopher Bollen brings a fresh perspective to the tale of a small town that hides secrets beneath its sleepy facade. With Orient, Bollen takes a real place—the North Fork of Long Island—and weaves a mesmerizing fictional web of characters and mysteries into a story that is as viscerally thrilling as it is intellectually precise. 

Orient is an isolated, quiet New York town, almost an island unto itself, but its peaceful facade is threatened by a cultural clash between the “year-rounders” who’ve called the place home forever and the wealthy newcomers who consider the town a refuge from the chaos of Manhattan. Even in its more peaceful moments, Bollen makes the place feel a bit like an idyllic powder keg waiting to burst into a firestorm. Things get more complicated when the body of a local caretaker is found floating in the water, followed shortly by the body of a creature that all the locals think might be from a research lab in the area. Rumors swell in the town, and many are centered on Mills Chevern, an orphan with a murky past who just arrived in Orient. More deaths follow, the town gets more fearful, and Mills ultimately joins a Manhattan transplant named Beth—who has problems of her own—in an effort to find out what’s really going on.

A sense of dread, of creeping disaster, builds in Orient from the very first page, and even though it takes a while for the first body to show up, Bollen has a knack for building tension through character, pacing and a sure sense of place. If you’re just looking for a great murder mystery, Orient has it, but there’s so much more to savor. Through this prism of a doomed American town, Bollen examines everything from class to parenthood to sexuality to privacy, and it’s all embedded within a central plot so intoxicating that you can’t help but linger on every moment searching for meaning. That Orient achieves this is enough to make it a page-turner. That the meaning you find often deepens as it dawns on you makes it a must-read novel.

This article was originally published in the May 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

BookPage Fiction Top Pick, May 2015

It’s a regular day in New York City. The subways are running, people are getting coffee and listening to headphones and going about their business. Then, in one seemingly isolated incident, a woman with blonde hair lashes out and kills without reason. As it turns out, the incident is not isolated at all.

In Emily Schultz’s third novel, The Blondes, the world succumbs to a mysterious, rabies-like pandemic that causes people to attack and kill at random. But it’s not everyone who is affected by the disease: It’s women. And not all women, but blonde women—both those who’ve colored their hair and those who were born blonde. Suddenly, the preferred hair hue for starlets, beach babes and Barbie dolls is dangerous and nearly forbidden. Women shave, color and cover their hair to try to stem the disease’s spread.

In the midst of these events, our main character, Hazel Hayes, tries to cope with a breakup and a pregnancy. She wants to get out of New York and go home to Canada, but the world is suspicious of women, and she faces literal attacks (from “Blonde Fury” victims), plus discrimination and paranoia.

Clearly, The Blondes touches on themes of gender identity and politics, broaching topics of adultery, pregnancy, abortion, gender studies, myths about female hysteria, menstruation prejudices and female portrayal in media. But the book delves deeper than hot-button issues and talking points to explore what happens when women turn against other women, what we do when we feel out of control and the choice of whether to stand aside when someone needs help or to hold out a hand.

Schultz handles all these themes masterfully, and that alone is impressive, but what really makes the novel great isn’t the gender politics—it’s the story. Hazel’s journey is outwardly terrifying and inwardly harrowing at the same time, creating a narrative we want to follow and a character we truly care about.
The Blondes is the book you can’t put down; it’s also the book you can’t stop thinking about after you do.

This article was originally published in the May 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Every Fifteen Minutes, best-selling author Lisa Scottoline’s latest page-turner, effectively draws readers in at two levels, both as gripping psychological suspense and as a vivid look into the tangled realms of the heart. The strength of Scottoline’s new standalone lies in its clever combination of tight plotting and a cast of believable characters. The spoiler in the life of Dr. Eric Parrish comes in the form of a dangerous sociopath, whose careful and deadly plan turns the psychiatrist’s life into the stuff of nightmares.

Parrish heads up a well-known and successful psychiatric unit in a big city hospital. He’s in the midst of a divorce, badly misses his 7-year-old daughter and is on the verge of a battle for custody. On the other hand, his professional life is going gangbusters, he’s respected and liked by the hospital staff and not a few women seemed tuned in his direction.

But Eric’s fortunes change—and mighty quickly—when he unexpectedly finds himself charged with sexual harassment, an unfounded claim that throws his custody fight into doubt. Then his latest private patient, a troubled 17-year-old named Max, suddenly flies out of control, throwing into doubt Eric’s belief that the boy’s not a danger to the public. After Max’s girlfriend is found murdered and the boy disappears briefly, Eric finds his career in jeopardy when he tries to exonerate his patient.

It doesn’t take long for readers, if not Eric, to figure out that there’s an outside force at work. Someone is pulling strings, intent on destroying the personal and professional life Eric’s worked so hard to secure. Scottoline provides a chilling and in-depth look at the narcissistic obsessions that inhabit the damaged mind of the sociopath, and keeps readers in suspense about the identity of the wrongdoer until the last spine-chilling moment.

The author is at her most compelling when she catches Eric realizing that, for all his careful training on how to deal with crazy situations, he’s failed to understand that one deeply disturbed person has set out to upend his life permanently, nor is he prepared for his role as intended victim. Drab title aside, Every Fifteen Minutes is filled with characters that are much more than one-dimensional cardboard cutouts, with a plot that’s disturbingly plausible, thus turning a familiar story into one full of razor-sharp suspense.

Brendan Duffy’s fantastic debut novel is gloomy, small-town Gothic horror in the vein of "Twin Peaks," Alan Wake and The Shining.

After a few rough years in Manhattan, a “semi-famous” author named Ben Tierney relocates his wife and sons to a remote village in the Adirondack Mountains. He hopes that renovating a sprawling, neglected estate called the Crofts and turning it into an inn will provide his family with a new sense of purpose. But isolated on a forested cliff overlooking town, it doesn’t take long for things to get thoroughly weird.

Deer carcasses appear on the Tierneys’ property, the remains ripped apart and barely recognizable. Strange artifacts turn up in the estate’s cavernous cellar, maps and letters and ancient books. Townspeople stare and whisper about “the winter families” whenever Ben ventures down into the valley. And one night, while Ben’s wife is cooking dinner, an explosive sound vibrates through the house. Ben finds a back door swinging open and shut in the wind, the lock smeared with tree sap.

“He turned on the exterior lights and looked out the glass. Placed in the center of the stoop like the morning’s newspaper was a severed deer’s head, staring at him with black, blood-flecked eyes.”

Most disturbing of all, Ben’s older son Charlie is convinced that someone, or something, is watching them from the woods. As a neo-Gothic horror novel, House of Echoes succeeds because it contains no familiar creatures. There are no ghosts here, despite some surface similarities to Chris Bohjalian’s The Night Strangers. There are no witches or werewolves. Duffy knows that true horror has neither name nor face. Grounded by emotional realism and nuanced characters, House of Echoes is intense, addictive and genuinely creepy.

The mood, hustle, power and immense growing pains of today’s China bleed through Jan-Philipp Sendker’s superlative suspense novel, Whispering Shadows, which delves into the explosion of big business following China’s Cultural Revolution. The juggernaut of change reaches from high places to the mean streets and local officials of Shenzhen, southern China’s economic hub, where burgeoning growth, financial windfalls and corruption are often out of control. German-born author Sendker served as an Asian correspondent for Stern news magazine for nearly five years and writes with a wealth of knowledge about all things China.

Three years after the death of his young son to leukemia, former journalist Paul Leibovitz is still trying to hang onto the past so his memory of Justin will never fade. After living nearly 30 years in Hong Kong, the expat American is now holed up on an outlying island, limiting his trips to the mainland, hoping that nothing in his daily life will erase Justin’s image from his troubled mind. The boy’s raincoat and yellow boots still hang near the door, and Paul is permanently estranged from his wife, who couldn’t persuade him that life must go on.

Paul painfully discovers that he is unable to ward off the changes that time brings like a pebble breaking the surface of a pond. On one of his infrequent trips off-island, Paul is thrown into contact with an American couple whose adult son, Michael Owen, has gone missing and is soon found murdered. Paul and his longtime close friend, Detective Zhang, are drawn into the search for his killer.

Owen, an enterprising and rich entrepreneur with far-reaching family business interests in China, was closely enmeshed with Victor Tang, a businessman of immense wealth and influence who operates at the center of Shenzhen’s grab for a uniquely Chinese version of capitalism. Paul and Zhang walk a knife’s edge of danger as they begin to investigate these titans of corporate power.

The finely tuned Whispering Shadows, the first book in a planned trilogy, reveals each character’s back story, from Owen’s parents to Paul’s troubled lover, Christine; from Zhang’s violent past to the hubris of the ambitious, implacable Tang. Each story is expertly woven into the whole cloth of this chilling book.

The body of a newborn girl has been found in an idyllic New Jersey town. It’s not the best assignment for a newspaper reporter who so recently delivered a stillborn child, but Molly Sanderson wants to prove to her editor that she can cover hard news. So—despite her husband Justin’s trepidation that covering this story might cause Molly to lapse back into serious depression—she dives in, determined to find out how the child ended up abandoned beneath a bridge.

Was it a homicide? Could it have been a panic-stricken student at the town’s prestigious Ridgedale University? Is there a connection to another death under the bridge two decades before? What about the mysterious mother and daughter who recently returned to a rundown apartment on the edge of town?

As Molly tracks down leads and interviews anyone who might have a connection to the mystery, she becomes immersed in the intrigue and politics of a tight-knit community. But then things take a more menacing turn, with college officials watching her every move and seemingly unconnected people coming together. When a mysterious package appears in their home, Justin fears for her safety—and her sanity. And Molly has no way to know just how close to home the story will hit.

Author Kimberly McCreight is well known for her 2013 best-selling debut, Reconstructing Amelia. With Where They Found Her, she has delivered another eerie, harrowing read. Through flashbacks and multiple narrators—some more reliable than others—McCreight weaves a deeply satisfying spellbinder that unfolds deliciously to the very last chapter.

RELATED CONTENT: Read our web-exclusive Q&A with McCreight about Where They Found Her.

This article was originally published in the April 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.