L.A. traffic can be murder, especially for Jace Damon, the determined bike courier in Tami Hoag's 10th thriller, Kill the Messenger. When a sleazy lawyer dispatches Jace to deliver a parcel, the address turns out to be a vacant lot. A mysterious car creeps toward him with obvious menace, and soon the teen messenger is on the run. When the lawyer is later found murdered, the mismatched male-female homicide team of Parker and Ruiz join the hunt. With the killer, the cops and the sinister sedan on his tail, Jace must risk all to save himself and his younger brother Tyler, who lives with him in a Chinatown hovel.

BookPage speed-dialed Hoag at her L.A. home for details on her latest thriller.

BookPage: What brought you to Los Angeles, literally and fictionally?
Tami Hoag: I moved out here three years ago because I was in love. The relationship didn't work out, but I love it here. There's an energy and enthusiasm. Everybody comes here with a big dream, and while a lot of them don't happen, there's always a chance that it will.

Did L.A. traffic inspire the plot for Kill the Messenger?
Actually, the kernel of it came eight years ago when I happened to catch a TV news program about bike messengers in Los Angeles. They talked about how bike messengers run between lawyers and the court, and right away I was thinking, here's a connection between the whole law enforcement community that no one has ever thought about. What can they be pulled into? How can these people get into trouble? That's always foremost in my mind.

You wrote about sisters in Dark Horse. What attracted you to return to siblings in Kill the Messenger?
Probably the fact that I'm the youngest in my family, by a lot the next youngest is 10 years older than me. So I didn't really have that sense of having a big brother or big sister to help guide me as a friend. That relationship interests me. Jace and Tyler are sort of two sides to the same character; they have a lot in common but they also complement each other in different ways.

One thing that sets your thrillers apart is that you tend to reward the good guys in equal measure to the punishment you dish out to the bad guys. Did you always have such a strong sense of karma about your work?
I'm big on that. That is part of what really attracted me to writing thrillers. The arc of development of the good guy is as important to me as the bad guy. They go on this journey and it's going to change them somehow. They aren't going to be the same people as they were before.

Did you don a helmet and try your hand as a bike messenger?
I didn't get that brave, no; my bike riding days are long past! They ended when I hit my dog with a bike and flipped over and ended up skidding down the road. It was, OK: I'm not meant to ride a bike.

But you've ridden horses competitively all your life! (Laughs) I know! That's what everybody says: "You won't get on a motorcycle but you will get on a horse that will throw you into space?!" Well, yeah. Somehow that's different.

The team of Parker and Ruiz is a classic odd couple. How did you cook them up?
Parker is sort of the L.A. Sam Kovac (Kovac and Nikki Liska are featured in the Minnesota-set Ashes to Ashes and Dust to Dust). When I started the book, I had Kovac so in my mind and it wasn't working for me. Then this metrosexual guy came forth. He's like Kovac's L.A. cousin: into fashion, drives a Jag. That was fun to write. Ruiz is one of those characters who just sort of walked in fully formed, and her whole purpose was to just put him into a tailspin. She kept him so off-balance, which I thought was fun instead of having the guy so cool and under control.

Could this become a new series?
I am definitely going to go back to those characters because I so enjoyed writing them. I loved them all the way to the end of the book, which is very unusual. Usually by that time, the characters have so taken over and they're going in all these directions and it's like, I'm sick of you people! Solve your problems! Wrap it up! And with these characters, I didn't feel that at all.

When Robert Ludlum died in March of 2001, millions of fans mourned the passing of a brilliant and prolific storyteller and the loss of future novels featuring his most popular character, CIA operative Jason Bourne.

But after the tremendous international success of the 2002 film adaptation of The Bourne Identity starring Matt Damon (its sequel, The Bourne Supremacy, is scheduled to hit theaters July 23) and the ever-increasing demand worldwide for a new installment in the Bourne saga, the Ludlum estate turned to Eric Van Lustbader, author of best-selling thrillers like The Ninja and Black Heart and one of Ludlum's friends. Lustbader, a longtime admirer of Ludlum's Bourne sequence, says he "jumped at the chance, because the estate promised I could do my own story and write in my own style." The result, he says, surprised even him. "In many ways it's the best novel I've ever written."

The Bourne Legacy begins with David Webb (aka Jason Bourne) retired from the CIA and teaching linguistics at Georgetown University. But when an assassin almost kills him on campus and he is framed for the murder of his two closest friends, Webb is forced to revert to his deadly Bourne persona. With the full force of the CIA and a relentless assassin closing in on him, Bourne must stay alive long enough to figure out who set him up, and why. His desperate quest, which takes him to Paris, Crete, Budapest and Iceland, also leads him to the last place he wants to go his past. Lustbader was right: The Bourne Legacy is arguably his best work to date. (And the shocking bombshells that he drops regarding the character of Jason Bourne will have fans of this series talking for months.) Powered by highly volatile, raw-edged emotion, and dozens of complex characters, each with their own intriguing history, The Bourne Legacy will leave readers furiously turning pages until its breathtaking (and heart-wrenching) conclusion.

The Rule of Four, a debut novel by recent Ivy League grads Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason, is comparable to numerous recently published thrillers (Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, Leslie Silbert's The Intelligencer, Lev Grossman's Codex, etc.) in which protagonists are put in mortal danger while trying to unravel cryptic secrets hidden in ancient texts. It would be an injustice, however, to categorize this novel as typical bibliophilic suspense. The Rule of Four is much more than that it's a masterfully complicated mystery, a powerfully touching romance and a cultural account of the Renaissance, as well as a bittersweet coming-of-age story about college seniors coming to grips with the "adult" world.

Tom Sullivan and Paul Harris are students at Princeton University. Paul enlists Tom's help in researching his senior thesis on the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, a real-life, renowned, shelf-bending Renaissance manuscript attributed to an enigmatic Italian nobleman. Written in seven languages with gruesome illustrations, Hypnerotomachia has mystified academics for more than five centuries. Tom, whose late father was a scholar obsessed with the text, finds that he, too, is drawn to its tantalizing secrets. What he and Paul discover is a revelation so incredible some would murder to possess it.

Readers who enjoy cipher-powered story lines will delight in Caldwell and Thomason's acrostics, anagrams, riddles and polyalphabetic cryptography. But this novel is ultimately powered by the deep relationships between the handful of protagonists, and the things they will do to sustain their friendship. The theme of responsibility increasingly prominent as the seniors near graduation (and potential incarceration) is epitomized by a professor's remark about writing the senior thesis: it's about shouldering something so big, you can't get out from under it.

Riveting, poignant and intensely intimate, The Rule of Four is a thinking person's thriller of the highest order.

Paul Goat Allen is a freelance editor and writer living in Syracuse, New York.

If 20-something polymaths put you off, better pass on this clever, erudite murder mystery set in the literary Boston of the mid-19th century. But you'd miss an entertaining and at times illuminating read.

Matthew Pearl, 26, a recent Yale Law School grad, became fascinated with Dante's work while at Harvard, where he earned the Dante Society of America's prestigious Dante Prize in 1998. The Society is in fact an outgrowth of a translation club founded by poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in Cambridge in 1865, during an era when Harvard's governing board was dead-set against admitting living languages as a valid area of study, preferring to cleave to Greek and Latin. Their reluctance also echoed the community's escalating xenophobia, prompted by the recent waves of Irish immigration. Italian, Pearl explains, "particularly represented the loose political passions, bodily appetites, and absent morals of decadent Europe." Hence, in preparing the first American edition of Dante's Inferno for publication, Longfellow's little club whose evolving roster of members included poet James Russell Lowell, litterateur/physician Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes and publisher James T. Fields was involved in a somewhat seditious undertaking.

Pearl ups the ante by introducing a fictitious series of murders, each as the four appalled literati quickly realize based on a specific punishment to be found in Dante's various levels of hell. Whereas the recreations of academic chitchat (however faithful) can be a bit tedious, the pace picks up considerably once the quartet is hot on the scent: picture middle-aged Hardy Boys in frock coats. Pearl has a gift for the grisly recounting, for instance, the disjointed dying thoughts of a too-pliable judge whose brain is being slowly dismantled by maggots, or the shock of a greedy minister experiencing his first human touch in many years: "The grasp was alive with passion, with offense." His demise is especially unpretty.

It's only in retrospect that one can appreciate the intricacy of the plot. As one red herring after another falls victim, the true villain hides in plain sight. Forehead-smacking is in order when the revelation finally arrives.

In all, the novel represents quite a feat, if not quite a tour de force. It's intriguing to imagine what might transpire if Matthew Pearl were to cast off the bonds of historicity and decide, like many a successful lawyer-novelist before him, to tackle contemporary chicanery.

Sandy MacDonald is a writer in Cambridge and Nantucket Massachusetts.

In Night Road, best-selling author and book club favorite Kristin Hannah gives us a tale of two families, closely linked though opposite in many ways, suddenly torn apart by one heartbreaking mistake.

By the time Lexi Baill is 14—her father disappeared, her mother a drug addict—she has lived in seven different foster homes and gone to six different schools. Kids like her, she knows, are “returnable, like old soda bottles and shoes that pinched your toes.” She’s finally adopted by her grandmother’s sister Eva, who lives in Port George, Washington, where Lexi starts high school.

Also starting high school are Mia and Zach Farraday, twins from a wealthy family on nearby Pine Island. Their mother Jude is the quintessential overbearing, overprotective mother—and she would do anything for them. So when Mia, who is shy and not nearly as popular as the good-looking, athletic Zach, becomes friends with Lexi, Jude opens up her home to her as if Lexi were her third child.

Even in their senior year, when Zach and Lexi realize they have fallen in love, the three remain as close as ever, Zach devoted to his sister, and Mia and Lexi the best of friends. Then college decisions loom over them—Mia wants desperately to attend USC and for Zach to come with her, but Lexi is only able to afford the local city college. Zach is torn, but his impending separation from Lexi becomes trivial following a tragic accident as the three return from a graduation party, and the lives of all are changed forever.

Hannah keeps her readers totally engaged throughout this moving novel, which shifts from a story of young love to an exploration of Jude’s grief, guilt and rage—and ultimately her ability to forgive what happened long ago on Night Road.

Suzanne Chazin, a member of the International Association of Arson Investigators, has unusual access to the inner workings of the New York City Fire Department. Her husband is a high-ranking chief and a 20-year veteran of the department, and her research includes interviews with many of its members. Flashover, her second electrifying thriller, is dedicated to the 343 members of the FDNY who died in the September 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center.

In this follow-up to her well-received debut effort, The Fourth Angel, Chazen continues the adventures of Fire Marshal Georgia Skeehan. This time she's investigating a series of deaths in fires that have reached flashover stage the overwhelming combustion of a room and its contents by simultaneous ignition. What she uncovers leads her into the inner politics and hazards of the fire and police departments. Georgia discovers frightening evidence of greed and deception that are the cause of these recent deaths and perhaps others to come. The trail of clues eventually leads to a blackmailer who wants to blow up an underground New York City gasoline pipeline.

Georgia's career and personal life collide when her best friend, a woman detective with the NYPD, disappears, and the man found in the woman's blood-spattered apartment is Georgia's boyfriend and fellow marshal, Mac Marenko. What keeps her going are her strong family ties to her mother and young son. Chazin's knowledge of pyrotechnics and the machinations of the agencies sworn to protect the public lend an air of authenticity to this fast-paced thriller. Deftly drawn, Flashover's believable characters drive the action to the very last page. But what really captures the reader's attention is the wealth of details about how fires wreak havoc and how they are investigated. The smallest piece of evidence spins a tale as intricately woven as any insect's web, and only the magic of science can unlock its secrets. Firefighting is one of the most frightening jobs imaginable, and the courage and talent of these brave folk are heroically outlined in the novel. Especially after September 11, this is fiction that rings true.

Kelly Koepke is a freelance writer and editor in Albuquerque.