Red, White, Blue, the new novel from screenwriter Lea Carpenter, is an intriguing, albeit challenging, read. Intriguing in that it revolves around a woman’s exploration into her father’s life—and death—as a CIA operative. Challenging in its narrative structure, which briskly alternates between two points of view over a series of short, nonlinear chapters. But for lovers of spy novels, it’s more than worth the read.

Carpenter carefully details the life of CIA operative Noel, from his training and his exploits within the agency to his ultimate death in an avalanche in the Swiss Alps. His daughter, Anna, who has always believed her father to be a New York banker, learns of his secretive profession by way of an encounter with an unnamed associate, who provides her with a series of recordings and videos about the man she only thought she knew.

As Anna reflects on her relationship with her father, she becomes immersed in the inner workings of the government agency and her father’s role in it. Readers learn along with Anna about the CIA’s secret training facility, the Farm, where future agents learn lessons in espionage. Subsequent sections detail interrogation techniques by polygraphers. And all of it slowly builds to a grander puzzle.

For Anna, coming to grips with her father’s past and his activities is emotional and moving, while at the same time intense and mysterious. The snapshot-like style of the novel takes some getting used to, and readers would be advised to read as much of the book in one or two sittings. Long pauses away from the novel may only serve to kill momentum and possibly sow confusion. Carpenter, who wrote the screenplay for this summer’s action-thriller Mile 22 about the CIA’s Special Activities Division, is well-versed in the shadowy world of espionage as well as adept at crafting an emotional page-turner.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Go Behind the Book with Lea Carpenter.

The plot of David Joy’s third novel, The Line That Held Us, is simple: A man accidentally kills another man and tries to cover it up with the help of a friend, while the murdered man’s brother seeks vengeance on them. The complexity of the novel comes in Joy’s evocative language, his unforgettable characters and how he weaves themes of family, friendship and justice throughout this darkly engrossing Southern crime noir.

Blood is spilled and revenge is inevitable in David Joy’s darkly engrossing third novel.

The novel’s bleak chain of events evokes memories of Joel and Ethan Coen’s Fargo, in which one ill-advised decision leads to another, and each new lie spirals out of control. Joy presents Darl Moody, a stereotypical Southern-by-the-grace-of-God country boy, whose hunting expedition in the backwoods of North Carolina goes awry when he shoots and kills Carol Brewer, another local yokel who was scavenging the forest for ginseng. Realizing what he’s done and not wanting to risk facing the law, Darl enlists the aid of lifelong best friend Calvin Hooper to secretly bury Carol’s body.

After Carol’s brother, Dwayne, discovers his brother is missing, it’s only a matter of time before he uncovers the truth. Of course, Dwayne has his own sense of justice—one that doesn’t involve the police—and neither Darl nor Calvin can escape his wrath. Calvin, meanwhile, wrestles with his sense of loyalty to Darl and his guilty conscience.

The law ultimately gets into the fray, but far too late to keep the impending violence at bay and the body count from stacking up.

Joy has been heralded for his ability to craft a powerful sense of place in his previous novels (Where All Light Tends to Go and The Weight of This World). He does so again in The Line That Held Us, bringing the Appalachian region and lifestyle to life. But it is his unforgettable characters and their moral dilemmas that will stay with you in the end.

This article was originally published in the August 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Can you be redeemed for crimes you did not commit? Charlotte Rowe has spent her adult life trying to find out. A husband-and-wife serial killer team kidnapped the infant Charlotte after they murdered her mother. They groomed her to follow in her footsteps, teaching her to operate a furnace that burned the bodies of their victims, and were about to initiate her into their killings when the FBI raided their hideout. Charlotte has spent her entire life under the spectre of their crimes, and the suspicion of some that she was complicit in the murders.

So when a powerful corporation and its shadowy allies trick her into piloting an experimental technology that gives her superhuman powers, Charlotte must decide whether she will seek freedom from their manipulations, or use their questionable but effective means to ensure no one else will have a childhood like hers.

It is instantly clear that there are no perfect heroes in Christopher Rice’s Bone Music, and that everybody has skeletons in their closets. The thrill, and for many readers, the challenge, is figuring out what those skeletons are, how they’re related and which of the many flawed people that populate Rice’s fictional American Southwest are really the good guys.

Bone Music is reminiscent of Michael Crichton at his best, but without his occasional myopias. Rice is refreshingly frank when constructing his characters, drawing clear distinctions among them without resorting to rhetorical kitsch or overwrought stereotyping. And he is really, truly funny. Although present-tense narration can be gimmicky, Rice’s storytelling voice carries enough bite that his real-time engagement with the story is consistently enjoyable, and his frequent sly interjections are welcome breaks in what could, in a different writer’s hands, so easily be a mawkishly macabre tale.

There are moments when Rice teeters on the brink of sensationalism, a rhetorical dance that supplies its own kind of thrill. Bone Music has not been sanitised, much to its credit. Few thrillers worth their salt are. Its population of survivors do not lend themselves to anodyne platitudes or flowery syntax, and Rice supplies neither. His characters are blunt, forthright, and frequently caustic, and his writing suits them well.

Bone Music is a funny, engaging story filled with interwoven backstories and intrigue that rarely, if ever, slows down. It’s a high-energy sci-fi thriller with few pretensions, a consistently entertaining and engagingly crafted story that careens around dusty Arizona roads, glittering corporate boardrooms and anonymous corners of the internet as each of its characters search for answers, seeking absolution for transgressions both real and imagined. And it’s a hell of a lot of fun to read.