“All love is desperate.” With this phrase, celebrated author Joyce Carol Oates manifests love gone wrong in Evil Eye, four novellas ringing of Gothic horror. Taking a page from du Maurier’s Rebecca, Oates puppeteers her childlike heroines through scenes of despondency set in the twisted, delusional reality that can be love, with the backdrop of oppressive circumstances and possessive men with gnarled secrets.

In the first novella, “Evil Eye,” Mariana has been subdued after her parents’ death and is tended to like a bird with a broken wing by a highbrow gentleman much her senior. His adoration and care result in her becoming his fourth wife. When his first wife visits, unsettling secrets come to light between his fits of rage, challenging both Mariana’s marriage and sanity.

In “So Near Anytime Always,” unassuming Lizbeth begins an innocent courtship with charming Desmond, a man with an air of elegance and worldliness. Their promising romance turns menacing after Desmond’s delusional outbursts of control.

The book crescendoes with “The Execution,” a grotesque tale of a well-to-do family and their resentful son. Bart seeks bloody retribution against his parents, and his plan is perfect by design: the layout, the execution and the getaway. Only his mother’s resilient love threatens to get in the way.

In the last novella, “The Flatbed,” the sexual oppression Cecelia endured as a child haunts her and threatens her relationships as an adult, lacing any sexual experience with overpowering tremors and bouts of hysteria. It isn’t until she discloses her unfathomable past to the love of her life that justice is served.

Through gripping stories that entertain and chill, Oates breeds psychological horror in our most vulnerable emotion: love. A fantastically unnerving read, the dazing darkness in Evil Eye comes from the possible reality of the circumstances.

In Paula Daly’s debut novel, Just What Kind of Mother Are You?, a mother’s nightmare unfolds over the course of four days. Four days may seem short to the average person, but for Lisa Kallisto, they are sickening, worry-laden and guilt-ridden. She is responsible for the disappearance of her best friend’s only daughter, and this isn’t the first teenage girl to vanish in the quaint Lake District. The first girl resurfaced in a nightmarish state after a horrible ordeal.

How could this happen? The answer may lie in the blind spots created by a stress-filled life, as Lisa is the epitome of an overworked woman. She is stretched thin between managing a struggling animal shelter, being a mother of three and trying to sustain a marriage. Balancing an extra chaotic week is all it takes to set off a terrifying series of events.

Just What Kind of Mother Are You? is a haunting, fast-paced suspense novel, outlined by a mother’s anxiety and a friend’s guilt. Subplots simmer to the surface, breaking characters’ boiling points and shattering porcelain perceptions, and leaving Lisa and the reader in a wide-eyed state of bewilderment and rage. The story becomes a disconcerting testament to domestic life and the potential deceit lying within every household.

Daly skillfully weighs the book with layers of emotion, seizing the reader’s empathy and ensuring the resounding effect of guilt, anger and fear. Daly binds insecurity with fear in this buzzing thriller to leave parents with a burning question at the forefront of their minds: Could this happen to me?

Readers who enjoy Laurie R. King's noteworthy Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes mystery series are in for a surprise and a major departure in tone with her new novel. In The Bones of Paris, the sequel to King’s 2007 standalone novel Touchstone, not-to-be-messed-with American investigator Harris Stuyvesant returns and once again looms large: He’s determined, melancholy and attractive to women, but he’s also a liar and dissembler with a hair-trigger temper, and he just can’t seem to learn from his own mistakes.

Stuyvesant is living abroad in 1920s Paris, but don’t expect flowers and flappers and flighty entertainment. He is investigating the disappearance of a young American woman with whom he had a brief romantic affair several months prior. He soon learns that she’s one of many who have recently vanished from Paris without a trace and are now presumed dead, and it looks a lot like murder. The Bones of Paris takes readers on a deadly journey into the boneyards and catacombs beneath the streets of Paris, sparing us nothing and introducing a killer who dispatches his victims cruelly, without fanfare and without remorse.

Though he prefers working alone, Stuyvesant joins forces with Doucet, a Parisian detective in charge of missing persons, who has been working to discover a pattern in the unsolved disappearances. In searching for clues, both men are drawn to the denizens of the Paris art community and into its Surrealist shadows. They must investigate whether the missing persons cases are connected to a reclusive Paris artist who uses bones—both human and animal—in his disturbing works of art displayed throughout the city, and they seek to discover the role played by the Grand Guignol theater, where simulated horrors becomes titillating entertainment for the city’s sophisticates.

In this engrossing tale, King brings to glittering life a decadent Paris roiling in the aftermath of World War I. She describes the seedy secrets of the Montparnasse art crowd, introducing cameos by well-known figures of the time—including a pugnacious Ernest Hemingway, American expat and bookstore proprietor Sylvia Beach, the notorious Surrealist Man Ray and his lover Lee Miller—cleverly weaving the characters into the book’s dark tapestry. The author provides illuminating historical details and nuances as Paris, sliding toward the brink of another great war, becomes one of the book’s most provocative characters.

Sarah and Jennifer believed that to be informed was to be prepared, so they became versed in all of the statistics of threatening situations and created a list of things to never do. They strictly followed the list until one night in college when they got in a car with a stranger—a devastating choice that led to five years of unspeakable torture, as Sarah and Jennifer were held captive with two other girls in an unforgiving cellar.

A former victim confronts old fears in this disturbing abduction thriller.

Ten years later, Sarah is trying to live with the realities of what happened, including the loss of her best friend and the fact that her former captor is up for parole in four months. He has been sending letters from jail to the three surviving girls, and Sarah believes that there is more to these letters than the mindless ramblings of a madman. She is determined to find evidence to keep her tormentor in jail and put her own mind to rest.

Following the directions of a maniac and piecing together pieces from the past, Sarah finds herself on a journey that is far removed from the sanctuary she has been hiding in for the last 10 years. Her search is interrupted by flashback chapters, slowly revealing the gruesome nature of Sarah’s years in captivity, and readers will experience the uneasy horrors of Sarah’s past as she works her way through a psychopath’s mind in search of her best friend's body. The fact that the evil man is still in jail slightly dilutes the story’s suspense, but all is not as it appears: Someone is doing his work for him, and Sarah risks getting in the way. Conflicts encountered along the way are quickly resolved, but the constant twists and turns will keep readers guessing until the end.

This story is a twisted tale of a courageous woman trying to make sense of a madman’s mind, but in her darkest moments, Sarah will be surprised by her own strengths and weaknesses. In addition to the terrifying moments, Sarah’s story is one of friendship, trust and the search for truth. For readers looking for a psychological thriller, The Never List will be hard to beat.

Close My Eyes, a new psychological thriller by Sophie McKenzie, poses the question of what happens when a woman loses a child at birth, and eight years later feels no letup in her sense of loss and bereavement. After all this time, a stranger arrives at Geniver Loxley’s door to say that her child was not stillborn, but in fact is very much alive. The stranger claims her sister, a nurse, attended the birth and saw the child alive and well. Still worse, she says that Gen’s husband knew about the deception, too. She’s short on details, but leaves her phone number so Gen can reach her once she absorbs the news.

When Gen’s husband, Art, hears this, he’s irate. He vehemently denies the stranger’s claim and speculates that it’s a horrible scam perpetrated as payback by a disgruntled business rival. He’s adamant against following up, but for Gen, the genie is out of the bottle. Inconsolable loss has turned into a kind of frantic hope, and with or without Art’s help, she decides to pursue the truth. Was her baby stillborn? If not, who was involved in what amounted to a horrific kidnapping? What could be the reason for such an unforgiveable act?

A mother will stop at nothing to discover the truth of her baby's death.

Gen remembers nothing of the birth, as she was deep under anesthesia, and must do her detective work from scratch. She searches through oddly incriminating bank records and newly discovered paperwork, talking with anyone who had a possible connection to the event. As grim and suggestive facts begin to emerge and a suspicious death impedes her efforts, she begins to suspect everyone—even Art. But luckily for Gen, and for the progress of the book, an amiable Irishman named Lorcan enters the action, and the balance of sanity begins to shift.

The book employs all the staples of this genre: a woman on an often lonely quest, fighting the odds as well as questions about her own sanity, and putting herself in danger to uncover the truth about something deeply personal. Is she just a gullible victim, or is there a conspiracy of silence among those nearest to her to shield her from some awful knowledge?

Author McKenzie pulls out all the stops in this tense shocker, including a surprising conclusion and a couple of final pages you won’t want to read in advance! Readers who like twists and page-turning surprises are in for a treat.

Readers, rejoice! All the elements Dan Brown used to such dramatic effect in Angels & Demons, The Da Vinci Code and The Lost Symbol are in full flower in his newest Robert Langdon thriller: impending global chaos and a frantic, day-long chase to avert it, a fanatically resourceful adversary, a beautiful and brainy companion and a pursuit route through some of the world’s most breathtaking architectural monuments. Hovering over the action is a menacing, ill-defined organization blandly called “the Consortium.” The enduring mystery here is why Langdon, who’s always on the run, hasn’t long since traded in his treasured Somerset loafers for a pair of Nikes.

Inferno begins with Langdon waking up in a hospital bed in Florence, Italy, and being told he’s just suffered a bullet wound to the head. Since his last memory is of walking across the campus at Harvard, where he’s a professor of symbology, this news comes as something of a shock. His attending physician introduces herself as Sienna Brooks. But before she can walk him through the events leading up to his present predicament, a spike-haired, black-clad woman assassin invades the hospital, apparently intent on finishing Langdon off. This launches Langdon and Brooks on a flight that will take them through the swankier museums and churches of Florence, Venice and Istanbul before the day is through. Early on, Langdon discovers he’s being chased because he may be able to discover the grand designs of renegade biochemist Bertrand Zobrist, who thinks the only way to save the world from overpopulation is by depopulating it with a plague.

The enduring mystery here is why Langdon, who’s always on the run, hasn’t long since traded in his treasured Somerset loafers for a pair of Nikes.

Even good-hearted Sienna seems swayed by Zobrist’s outlook. “Robert,” she tells him, “speaking from a purely scientific viewpoint—all logic, no heart—I can tell you without a doubt that without some kind of drastic change, the end of our species is coming. And it’s coming fast. It won’t be fire, brimstone, apocalypse, or nuclear war . . . it will be total collapse due to the number of people on the planet. The mathematics is indisputable.” So is Sienna really his friend or foe? Much of the appeal of Brown’s tale comes from never quite knowing where each character’s allegiance lies.

Zobrist, who is dead before Langdon enters the picture, leaves clues to his destructive intent by dropping references to Dante’s multilayered Hell, as described in the “Inferno” section of his Divine Comedy. Like Zobrist, Langdon is a Dante scholar and perhaps the one person who can decipher these clues before the plague is launched. Thus he is caught between the minions of the World Health Organization, which is determined to abort Zobrist’s plans, and those of the Consortium, which is just as resolute in ensuring those plans are carried out.

Although the general tone of the book is apocalyptic, Brown isn’t averse to having some fun at his own expense. At one point, Langdon phones his editor in New York at 4:28 in the morning to plea for the use of a corporate jet. “If you want to write Fifty Shades of Iconography,” his dyspeptic editor grumbles, “we can talk.” But Langdon pushes on, hoping to gain traction by citing his authorial integrity: “Have I ever broken a promise to you?” he persists. “Other than missing your last deadline by three years?” the editor muses peevishly before finally giving in.

Beyond providing readers the excitement of the chase and incidental lessons in art history, Brown also deserves credit for highlighting the very real problem of an increasing population vying for rapidly dwindling resources. Maybe it’s time for Langdon to turn activist.

Edward Morris writes from Nashville, and interviewed Dan Brown before he was famous.

Conway Sax is not, in general, the kind of guy you cozy up to. He has close ties with girlfriend Charlene and her kids, but commitment often eludes him. He’s done time and has a hair-trigger temper that he euphemistically calls a “red mist.” A recovering alcoholic, he’s wildly loyal to his AA band of brothers, the Barnburners, but he’s always getting into catastrophic scrapes and making the same mistakes time and again.

So why is this character so hard to dismiss? Shotgun Lullaby, author Steve Ulfelder's third book in the Conway Sax series, may be your best clue. It’s Ulfelder’s best, most tightly written story so far, following on the successful heels of his first two books, Purgatory Chasm and The Whole Lie.

Conway Sax is a mess—but readers will love him anyway.

Shotgun Lullaby presents readers with a snappy, memorable cast of characters, including a young recovering alcoholic, Gus, who kicks off the train of mayhem by unknowingly reminding Sax of his estranged son. Right off the bat, it’s clear that Sax will throw caution to the wind and make every effort to protect the young man. A murder at Gus’ halfway house sends Sax onto a trail that gets more devious and littered with bodies as the pages turn, involving Gus’ wealthy father, his sexy second wife and Gus’ stoner friend Brad, as well as mobsters, con men and a savvy state-cop-slash-ally.     

The book is riveting because Ulfelder knows how to write: His prose is uncluttered, the dialog matches real-life talk and the humor is actually funny, with a welcome absence of wisecracks.

Sax is riveting because he’s struggling, and we can recognize some of his failings as ours. He suffers from a form of “act now, plan later” adrenaline in his efforts to set things right, and he’s sometimes unwilling to think through the consequences of his actions. His closest supporters, including Charlene, her teenage kids and his best buddy Randall, understand all this about him, but he often ignores their wisest advice—and sometimes places them in jeopardy. In Lullaby, a final harrowing scene brings all of Sax’s messy contradictions to bear in one breath-holding moment readers won’t soon forget. It’s a testament to the author’s skill that we keep hoping Sax will pull things together. We want him to slow down and breathe deeply, and we’re still on his side.

Shotgun Lullaby will make an indelible impression on all readers up for a great ride.