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.

While away on duty, Army Ranger Van Shaw receives a chilling note from his grandfather: “Come home, if you can.” The last time the two talked was 10 years ago—a conversation that resulted in a bloody brawl. Pride and stubbornness run strong in this family, so for the old man to reach out means there’s something big happening back home.

Van had prepared himself for the estranged exchange waiting for him, but not for what he finds: his grandfather with a gunshot wound to the head, bleeding out on the floor. As the first person on the scene and in light of their complicated relationship, Van knows he’s suspect number one. To clear his name and obtain retribution, Van must return to his illicit past as a kid criminal and exploit his grandfather’s exceptional career as a professional thief. With the cops questioning his every move, Van takes to the streets to seek answers from his grandfather’s cronies. But this is not without a price—Van has worked his way up the army ranks, and one wrong move could cost him his status or his life.

Glen Erik Hamilton’s impressive debut novel fuses procedural plotting, vigilantism and noir. The seedy setting and one man’s hunt for justice create an emotionally stirring and morally ambiguous read. Past Crimes keeps readers on edge and second-guessing every character, and when that last page is turned, one question remains: Will Van return to the life he labored so hard to forget? It will have to be answered in the much-anticipated second installment in this clever, intoxicating series.

Ten years ago, Ian Caldwell and his co-author, Dustin Thomason, struck gold with The Rule of Four, a page-turning academic mystery with emotional depth. Now, after a decade of research, writing and rewriting, Caldwell is back with a solo effort, a new novel that promises to live up to The Rule of Four. And The Fifth Gospel delivers, with compelling characters, impeccable pacing and a central enigma that is as intellectually satisfying as it is emotionally harrowing.

The year is 2004, and Pope John Paul II is nearing the end of his time leading the Roman Catholic Church while still working to fulfill a few final wishes. The Vatican is rocked, though, when a curator turns up murdered in Rome just a week before he was set to unveil a powerful new exhibit in the Vatican Museums. When police can’t find a suspect, Greek Catholic priest Alex Andreou—a friend of the curator and expert on the Gospels—takes it upon himself to unravel the mystery, one that concerns a mysterious fifth Gospel manuscript, a legendary relic and a secret that could shake the church to its core.

Caldwell constructs the novel’s central puzzle masterfully, weaving between past and present, danger and intrigue, codes and obfuscations at a blistering pace that makes the more than 400-page novel breeze by. But the key to The Fifth Gospel’s effectiveness is Alex’s emotional, intense point of view. Caldwell has woven a tale that’s as much about brotherhood, faith, the sins of the past and what it means to atone as it is about the central mystery and its faith-shattering secrets. The Fifth Gospel is rooted in a powerful, very human emotional core.

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

It’s no easy feat to cast a German who admits to cheering Hitler’s election as the lead detective in a murder mystery. But readers quickly discover that little is as it seems in this dark historical thriller based on an actual gruesome crime spree that shook Nazi Germany in the months before the U.S. entered World War II.

Georg Heuser, a talented, young detective who emphasizes to the reader that he never technically joined the Nazi party, is teamed up with a grizzled veteran to find the so-called S-Bahn murderer, who not only violently kills women but also seems to get a sexual thrill out of doing so. Ostland alternates between Heuser’s investigation and that of Paula Siebert, who is sent to Europe more than a decade after WWII’s end to look into Nazi war crimes, including Heuser’s. How did the ambitious Heuser—who went to great lengths to distinguish himself from the thuggish Nazis he loathed—become yet another war criminal? That is the question that propels this insightful novel, which makes strong use of historical events and figures to create two compelling narratives.

Author David Thomas occasionally relies too heavily on telling rather than showing (Heuser superfluously describes himself as “filled with ambition and determination”), and the dialogue at times falls flat. But Heuser is an undoubtedly disturbing and fascinating character, while the (fictional) Siebert stands in for the horrified reader as we learn of the inhuman depths to which Heuser, and so many like him, sank in the name of some grotesque program of racial purity. The S-Bahn killings, Thomas makes painfully clear, foreshadowed the more widespread horrors that Heuser and his comrades inflicted on the civilized world.

“When you stopped trying to be one perfect person, you could be many.” A small-town Tennessee girl flourishes into a classic, yet never cliché, femme fatale in Rebecca Scherm’s provocative coming-of-age debut, Unbecoming.

Grace had her siren song down to the perfect ringing notes: prim cardigans, sweet smiles and a melodic laugh capable of enticing anyone. This pristine exterior did well to hide her poor and neglected upbringing, and she fooled even herself—but throughout life and love Grace realized her hands have been too often taunted to touch and possess what is not hers. Perhaps some of us are just born bad, despite all efforts to dispel the wicked. When an art heist goes awry, Grace embraces her darker side and transforms to protect herself. At every new job and in every new city, she’s someone new, her identity stunningly ambiguous. She can never again be “Grace.”

With a well-researched plot and illuminating prose, Unbecoming delivers a character that does and does not evoke sympathy. Grace is slippery, cunning and complex as she evolves into a highbrow jewel bandit living off the grid. Just as she does for herself, Grace remakes the jewelry into something unrecognizable, taking stones from this one and replacing them from that one.

From the high-end art world of New York to the dusty basement of an antiques dealer in France, Unbecoming is an atmospheric adventure from start to finish.