Chevy Stevens’ debut thriller, Still Missing, was a runaway hit, and her hotly anticipated follow-up, Never Knowing, is nearly impossible to put down.

Sara is a feisty single mother—simultaneously running a carpentry business and planning her wedding—who feels an uneasy void in her life. With little connection to her adoptive parents, she decides to investigate the identity of her birth parents. Her search leads to a startling discovery: Sara’s birth mother was the rape victim and sole survivor of the elusive Campsite Killer.

As the killer strikes out on another murderous rampage, Sara slowly learns more about herself—and her biological father. Through phone calls, the killer manages to torture Sara and yet also endear himself to her. Hiding this news from her family and fiancé, Sara risks her job, her relationship and even her own daughter to catch the man who has evaded everyone, including herself.

With heart-pounding action and a main character whose faults only make her more engaging, this spine-tingling novel grapples with the danger and pain of unrevealed truth.

The 1979 international thriller Shibumi, by the author Trevanian, quickly became a classic of the genre. The hero of Shibumi was Nicholai Hel, the son of an aristocratic Russian mother who immigrated to Japan, who was raised after his mother’s death by his samurai surrogate father. Contemporary thriller author Don Winslow (Savages) has taken up Hel’s story in Satori, revealing how Hel came to be a professional assassin working for the CIA—a mastermind fluent in English, French, German, Chinese and Japanese, and trained in the complex strategies of “Go,” the ancient Japanese board game similar to chess, but much more intricate.

It’s 1951, and Hel, 26, is just emerging from three years of solitary confinement. The Americans—actually the CIA—are releasing him, his freedom contingent on his agreeing to go to Beijing and assassinate Yuri Voroshenin, the Soviet commissioner to China.

To aid in the completion of this difficult assignment, considered by the CIA to be a suicide mission, Hel is given a new face and a new identity—that of Michel Guibert, a French national and the son of an arms dealer with ties to the French Communist Party. The many obstacles in Hel’s path include Solange, a highly paid French prostitute who may or may not be an assassin herself; Major Diamond, a ruthless CIA operative who will stop at nothing to avoid losing control of his lucrative Southeast Asia drug operation; and a motley mélange of drug lords, pirates and the Corsican Mafia.

Armed with “naked kill” karate skills and a superhero-like heightened “proximity sense,” which gives him an early warning of approaching danger, Hel dispatches one enemy after another, maiming or killing them like pawns on a chessboard. And he accomplishes all of this while striving to reach his ultimate goal: an understanding of the Zen Buddhist concept of satori—living in harmony with the world.

Winslow superbly carries on the Shibumi tradition in this action-packed novel that will appeal not only to Trevanian fans, but readers of contemporary thrillers as well. 

As the book picks up the pace, Beecher comes alive too, shedding his naive, nice guy persona as he uncovers the layers of conspiracy. And as he uses his librarian sleuthing skills it’s impossible not to root for the little guy going up against the President. Meltzer’s ending leaves the door open to future adventures for Beecher. Let’s hope we see him again. 

It’s often said that history repeats itself, and it would appear that literary history—at least where Dennis Lehane is concerned—is no exception. In the world of private investigators Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro, it’s been 12 years since four-year-old Amanda McCready vanished in Gone, Baby, Gone, only to be returned to her neglectful and conniving mother by a morally and ethically conflicted Kenzie. Now 16, Amanda, whip-smart and hardened by chronic parental neglect, has once more disappeared into the swirling eddies of Boston’s organized crime cartels. Her aunt Beatrice yet again appeals to Kenzie and Gennaro to find out what happened to Amanda, by extension offering a chance to lay to rest the demons that plagued them after the resolution of Amanda’s first disappearance. Kenzie is no longer a young man; now married (to Gennaro) and raising their own four-year-old daughter, he has more at stake personally than ever before, and the myriad complications of Amanda’s latest disappearance, along with the ghost of her previous kidnapping, have a personal immediacy that he can’t escape. As with any tale of crime and intrigue, there is far more at stake than Kenzie can guess, and he is quickly drawn into a situation that far outstrips his aging sensibilities and capabilities.

The sixth book in the Kenzie and Gennaro series, Moonlight Mile is as much a meditation on what it is to love another person as it is a slyly woven action tale, in which the heroes are getting older while the challenges they face seem only to become more morally fraught and powerful as time passes. What is left for someone when the life they once lived and loved, full of danger, blood and excitement, is no longer one they can sustain? How do you do right by the world when every choice hurts either those you love or those you strive to help? Lehane manages to address these weighty questions, deftly skirting tired moral platitudes and all the while keeping the reader’s pulse pounding. Those who enjoyed the previous books will certainly enjoy this one, while new readers will have the opportunity to enjoy the crackling chemistry Kenzie and Gennaro share, all the while being drawn into tightly plotted action that keeps the pages turning. Snappy dialogue, questions with morally ambiguous answers, a sense of the enduring humanity that manages to draw people together despite their situation, and a winking acknowledgement of the ironic comedy that is life all come together to give this book a sense of reality that is both rare and refreshing.

The newest addition to John le Carré’s extensive list of novels proves that this master of the espionage genre is still at the height of his authorial powers. Filled with Russian spies, financial and political scandals and even a few games of tennis thrown in for good measure, Our Kind of Traitor has all the necessary elements for a rip-roaring, intelligent thriller that never lacks in high-wire suspense.

When young British couple Perry and Gail decided to splurge on a Caribbean tennis holiday, they never imagined their dream vacation could go from fun in the sun to deadly dealings so fast. Without really being sure how it happened, they find themselves inexplicably linked to money-launderer Dima, who has ties to the Russian mafia. He enlists the couple’s aid in seeking amnesty from the British Service in exchange for information concerning corruption in the British banking system. Before they have the chance to say no, Perry and Gail find themselves acting as pawns in a sinister game well beyond their depths, one that will take them on a whirlwind tour through Paris, Switzerland and beyond, always with the British Secret Service nipping at their heels.

Le Carré has managed to capture a snapshot of history and immortalize it in the suspenseful and morally complex Our Kind of Traitor, which is based on a December 2009 article in The Observer claiming that at the height of the economic crisis in 2008, it was drug money keeping the British financial system afloat. A member of the British Foreign Service from 1959 to 1964, le Carré is well-positioned to infuse the thrilling story with the gravitas necessary to set it apart from your dime-a-dozen drugstore pulp fiction. A solid addition to his oeuvre, Our Kind of Traitor does not disappoint, and readers should be prepared for one heck of a ride.