Much has been discussed in recent years about what it means to be a man in modern America: the belief that men should be masculine yet tender, chivalrous yet feminist, strong yet vulnerable. In the chillingly good A Good Man, debut novelist Ani Katz examines what happens when the weight of expectations comes crashing down on one family. 

Thomas Martin was raised in the nightmarish tangle of an abusive home, where his father took out his disappointment on his children. After his father dies, Thomas becomes the man of the house, working his way through college and up the corporate ladder. He provides for his mother and younger sisters, who still live together in semi-squalor because they don’t know any other way.

Thomas is wary of bringing Miriam, the beautiful Parisian woman he plans to marry, to his family home, where she “would notice the skid marks of dried grease around the rims of the plates, the crusty residue at the bottom of our tumblers.” It’s as if every grubby object reflects upon him and his shame-filled childhood.

When it comes time to make his own family, Thomas is determined to attain perfection and nothing less. “We were two of a kind, my wife and I,” he says. “If my life up to that point had been like an old and battered house, she wanted to rip the rot from the rooms, banish the bad memories, throw open the windows, and fill the place with light and air and the breath of the future.” 

They buy a Dutch colonial home outside Manhattan and have a daughter. Thomas makes more money and drives his daughter to private school in a Mercedes S-Class sedan. Miriam struggles with postpartum depression and suburban isolation, but they work through it.

Everything is perfect—and yet. His relationship with Miriam is fraying. Their daughter is filled with the ennui of a typical preteen. When Thomas makes a catastrophically bad decision at work, he finds everything he’s worked for evaporating around him.

This is when A Good Man—infused with a low-grade dread from the very first page—takes a seriously sinister turn. The full impact of Thomas’ childhood trauma comes into focus as he retraces how things went so wrong and admits he may not be the most reliable narrator. 

Katz has delivered a whip-smart, beautifully written meditation on marriage, masculinity and the thin line between happiness and disaster.

When Anna McDonald’s husband announces he’s leaving her for her best friend, she finds comfort in true crime podcasts—until she recognizes the victim of her new favorite podcast as a man she once knew. When her best friend’s has-been rock-star husband turns up on her doorstep, he becomes the unwitting accomplice in helping her unravel the podcast’s mystery. Soon they’re jet-setting around Europe as Anna becomes entangled with assassins and uncovers a plot involving one of the richest, most secretive people in the world. Much of Conviction takes place in Scotland, and narrator Cathleen McCarron does a great job with accents and secret identities. Denise Mina’s latest thriller is a fun, edge-of-your-seat listen that feels very contemporary with its use of social media and podcasts to drive the story forward.

Sarah Jane Pullman has lived a hardscrabble life. Her mom disappeared at regular intervals throughout her childhood. Her tour of duty in the Middle East ended with an RPG that killed her patrol partner right in front of her. She has cooked at every out-of-the-way diner in the tri-state area and fled an abusive marriage. But Sarah Jane has a knack for taking life as it comes.

“Lives rarely go into the oven as goo and come out beautifully golden,” she says.

Author James Sallis has delivered a long list of excellent crime novels, as well as biographies and books of poetry. With its spare but insightful prose and probing exploration of the price of our sins, Sarah Jane fits among his finest.

The titular character has settled down as a small-town cop, managing the fender benders, bar fights and neighborhood quarrels that pass for crime in a sleepy Middle America town. She regularly sees a man she likes just fine, and although she tends to keep to herself, she has a handful of friends and many more admirers of her low-key approach to the law.

Sallis imbues his story with an astonishingly real sense of place, settling Sarah Jane in a town that is “the kind of place that has period gingerbread houses shouldered up against modern cookie-cutters, where hardware stores and gas-and-live-bait shops cling to town’s edge, where you hear the whisper of old-country vowels in local speech.”

When an unusually violent crime shakes the town, it soon becomes clear Sarah Jane’s long-ago choices have caught up with her. Her intense need for privacy rubs up against the community’s need for answers. Sarah Jane finds herself thinking about her “patchwork past” and how it has led her to a place she can call home. This book will leave you marveling about our ability to carve out a life, no matter how different it is from what we expected.

As Sarah Jane learns, “However hard you stare at maps and plan, you rarely get where you think you’re going.”

Stephen King’s The Institute is already drawing comparisons to a couple of his older works, Firestarter and It, as well as to the Netflix sensation “Stranger Things.” And with good reason—The Institute includes a ragtag collection of adolescents banding together against a common enemy, a shady organization exploiting children for their unique “gifts.” But whether King is chasing “Stranger Things” or “Stranger Things” is chasing King, the result is the same: shocking suspense and hallmark thrills.

In an unexpected move, King opens The Institute with a Jack Reacher-like drifter named Tim Jamieson, who takes a job as a “night knocker” with the sheriff’s department in rural Dupray, South Carolina. It’s more than 50 pages later before we meet the novel’s true protagonist, young prodigy Luke Ellis, whose parents are trying to get him into a prestigious school where his unique intellect will be challenged.

But Luke’s world is shattered when he is kidnapped from his Minneapolis home in the middle of the night by a team of highly skilled special operatives. He awakens in a room made to look like his own, though the illusion stops at the door. Once outside his room, Luke finds himself in a strange facility somewhere in Maine. He soon learns he’s not alone, as other kids, ranging in age from 10 to 16, are also being held prisoner. King conveys Luke’s confusion, shock, hopelessness and grief in convincing and heart-wrenching fashion.

The concept of family separation takes on an eerie weight here, with unsettling parallels between the events of the novel and the real-life images we see on the news of kids huddled under silver mylar blankets in cramped cages at the U.S.–Mexico border. In a thinly veiled comparison to callous border patrol agents, Luke’s adult captors lack compassion and are  often downright cruel. 

But King ramps up the cruelty even further, subjecting Luke to physical and mental abuse that, at times, readers may find hard to sit through. Luke and the other kids get slapped around, are forced to receive mysterious injections that cause convulsions and are nearly drowned in a sensory deprivation tank, all to awaken the kids’ latent telepathic or telekinetic powers. The kids are promised that, if they do as they are told, they’ll have their memories wiped and be returned home to their parents as if nothing ever happened. Good behavior is rewarded with tokens to purchase snacks or even alcohol and cigarettes. Kids can even buy time on a computer, though internet access is restricted.

After gaining the trust and help of one of the Institute’s support staff, Luke makes a break for freedom. His escape brings him to South Carolina, where Tim Jamieson finally reenters the story just in time to aid Luke in a final confrontation with the Institute’s baddies.

King makes no effort to hide his distaste for Trump, as he takes a direct jab at him in the book’s waning pages. Political leanings aside, The Institute offers a thrilling reading experience and rousing tribute to the resilience of children and the unending fight against evil.

Reading The Warehouse is a kind of nightmare. Its near-future dystopia seems startlingly plausible; the split-narrative structure goes round and round like a Lazy Susan; and Rob Hart’s prose feels as densely claustrophobic as the living conditions he has constructed for the disenfranchised millions now working for the Warehouse, the hideous corporate giant (read: Amazon, a few clicks down the road) that has so benevolently, inevitably and horribly rescued the world’s ruined economy.

The novel doesn’t even bother with character development. Why should it? The only thing that matters in this book is the vastness of the nightmare. For this purpose, cardboard will do just as well as flesh and blood. The three main persons in the story (I want to call them “assets”) would literally rather die than be developed. First, there’s ordinary poor sod Paxton, who can’t pay his bills, so he gets on the bus to one of the Warehouse’s mega-centers, passes the entry exam and starts his job as a security officer, color-coded uniform and all. Second, there’s the smart, anti-establishment terrorist Zinnia, who also passes the exam and decides to enlist Paxton’s help to get the dirt on the Warehouse and bring it down.

And then there’s the third figure of Hart’s novel, who lifts the story out of its landfill of clichés, the only one who speaks to us in first person: Gibson, the founder and supreme leader of the Warehouse. It’s Gibson who transcends the book’s cynicism and obvious agenda. As an up-to-date incarnation of the beatific, ruthless redeemer archetype, Gibson elevates The Warehouse to the zone of indispensable satire and dark spiritual inquiry, the space where Dickens, Kafka, Orwell and Koestler reign. These titans of the genre have shown us what it looks like when evil wears the mask of goodness, how it feels when our salvation asks us to abandon all hope and what happens to us when the shining light of progress becomes an all-consuming darkness.

I hope they don’t make a movie out of this book. It’s already impossible to wake up from.

Ruth Ware’s homage to The Turn of the Screw is filled with all of the best gothic elements: an unreliable narrator, an isolated setting, creepy children and a house that functions as its own menacing character. Part epistolary novel, part psychological thriller, The Turn of the Key is compulsively readable and will keep readers guessing until the very last page.

Rowan Caine worries that the live-in nanny job she’s secured may be a little too good to be true. The pay is outstanding, the residence is a beautiful estate in the Scottish Highlands, and the parents want her to start right now. Almost immediately her fears are validated. Her charges, 8-year-old Maddie and 5-year-old Ellie, are fractious and have already burned through several caregivers. The home, Heatherbrae House, is a “smart home,” where every convenience is controlled by an app named “Happy” and every room except the bathrooms are monitored by security cameras. Left alone with two mutinous charges and a house that can be controlled remotely is enough to stretch Rowan to her last nerve.

Those elements are certainly chilling enough (especially when the “Happy” app nightmarishly malfunctions), but Ware expertly weaves in a supernatural element as well. Already fraught, Rowan begins experiencing strange events, like the sound of someone pacing in the supposedly empty, walled-off space above her room, and when objects start going missing or moving seemingly on their own. Then there is the story of a small girl who tragically died of an accidental poisoning in the house decades earlier.

A rational person might quit, but as the novel progresses, we learn that Rowan has secrets of her own, ones she certainly doesn’t want her employers uncovering. All of these twists and turns might feel unwieldy in the hands of another writer, but Ware is adept at managing multiple plot threads and using them to shock her reader.

The beauty of The Turn of the Key is in how it takes the tropes central to the gothic genre, like the isolated haunted house, and gives them a 21st-century spin while still managing to feel fresh and surprising to even the most gothic-averse reader.

Straddling the line between horror and thriller, this novel will delight fans of both genres.

What if someone you loved died and left you a letter plus a few important items? And the letter turned out to be a to-do list for vengeance? And those things were not mementos, but rather a gun, a counterfeit passport and some cash?

In Beijing Payback, California college student Victor Li and his sister, Jules, are stunned when their father, Vincent, a beloved owner of three Chinese restaurants, is murdered. In short order, they discover the aforementioned bizarre and alarming contents of their father’s safe, and a mysterious man named Sun—who knows all about their dad, though they had no idea Sun existed—shows up, ready to assist Victor in going to China to exact revenge on Vincent’s behalf.

It’s a dangerous, quite possibly fatal undertaking (for one thing, Victor’s a college athlete, not an assassin), but he ultimately decides to fulfill his dad’s wishes for one reason: Their comfortable life in suburban America wasn’t due solely to proceeds from the restaurants but from profits earned by the global crime syndicate his father and a few friends founded in post-Mao China.

This is not a typical realizing-your-parents-are-flawed story, to be sure, and debut author Daniel Nieh really goes for it, packing in action, suspense, drama, plus some humor and sexiness, too. The author’s background in Chinese-English translation serves him well, as skillfully employed language throughout evokes Victor’s ties to his Chinese heritage and reinforces his ability to move between cultures as he tries on various personas: basketball player, suave dude, loyal friend, family member . . . and righteous badass?

Drunken college parties give way to terrifying, blood-spattered encounters as the stakes grow ever higher, and Victor must reckon with the truth about his family’s past and its implications for his future in this entertaining, colorful debut.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our Q&A with Daniel Nieh about Beijing Payback.

Joshilyn Jackson’s newest novel weaves a wicked tale right from its opening pages. When a mysterious and charismatic woman named Angelica Roux shows up at a suburban book club in a small Florida town, Amy Whey has a sinking feeling that a bomb is about to drop on their cozy lives.

Roux gets the liquor flowing and slips the reins from Charlotte, the book club’s leader and Amy’s best friend. As the women relax, Roux starts a seductive game—an adult version of “Never Have I Ever,” in which each woman shares the worst thing she’s done in the past week, then month, then year and so on. The women are giddy with the newness of Roux’s game and her feral flirtation. When a married woman confesses to kissing another man, Amy worries that her neighbor is messing around with Charlotte’s husband. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Roux somehow knows a terrible secret from Amy’s past, and Amy thinks Roux has shown up to trap her.

Amy has worked hard to rebuild her life. She has a loving husband, a quirky teenage stepdaughter named Maddy and a baby to dote upon. But as Amy’s past threatens to collide with her present, she is forced to play Roux’s dangerous game. After the party has ended, Roux starts to chip away at Amy’s cool exterior, demanding hush money for the secrets she keeps. But Amy reveals herself to be shrewder than she seems, and she’s determined to keep her family and new best friend from knowing what’s buried deep in her heart.

Things get even stickier as Maddy cozies up to Roux’s son, Luca, who seems like the type of boy to break Maddy’s heart, or worse. When Roux sets a deadline for the hush money, Amy decides the only way to get out is to beat Roux at her own game.

With excellent pacing, clever character development, fun plot twists and a palpable setting, Never Have I Ever is a binge-worthy read. Jackson brings her first thriller to the table this summer, and you don’t want to miss it.

Halfway through Natalie Daniels’ novel of grief, middle-age regret, betrayal and acid—specifically, acidic British wit—something happens that the reader can scarcely believe. Connie, the protagonist, overhears something. At first you don’t know whether she’s meant to hear it, she’s hearing it by accident or if it’s a bit of both. Whatever the cause of the inadvertent eavesdropping, what Connie learns is shocking. And it leads to a lot of bad craziness.

Daniels teases out Connie’s story bit by bit. At first, we see this humorsome and perceptive lady in a London playground with her preschool-age daughter. There, Connie meets Ness, the mother of another preschooler. The mums and their daughters quickly become the best of chums. Next thing we know, Connie—burned, battered, sliced up—is in an institution. We don’t even need to be told that one of the reasons for her predicament is Ness.

Connie isn’t the only troubled female in this novel. Her psychiatrist is Emma Robinson, whose own problems cause her to identify with her patient a bit more than she should. What happened to Emma is much too close to what almost happened to Connie. Indeed, just about all the women and girls in Daniels’ tale have something at least a little wrong with them. Connie’s daughter is strange, her mother has Alzheimer’s, and Ness seems to be at the whim of her premenopausal hormones. (The reader shouldn’t wonder why her name rhymes with “mess.”) Connie’s fellow inmate, whom she calls Mental Sita, likes to pretend she’s a dog. All the while, fathers, sons and husbands are either absent or just sort of stand around and go about their manly business. Is it the patriarchy that’s making these women sick and crazy and leaving their men so disconnected? Why don’t we need to be told that Ness is part of the reason Connie went mad? Is this how it must be? Must women’s relationships with each other always end up toxic, tormented, even deadly?

Maybe there is healing at the end, but clever, heart-shattering Too Close reminds you of the minefields you have to crawl through to get to it.

Fans of Paula Hawkins will be thrilled by Allison Dickson’s The Other Mrs. Miller. Phoebe Miller is starting to believe her best years are behind her. Heiress to a fortune left by her philandering late father, she passes the days in a haze of alcohol. Arguments with her husband, Wyatt, add to her feelings of discontent. But her life takes an unexpected turn after the Napiers move in across the street. Ron, a doctor; Vicki, his wife; and Jake, their attractive and flirtatious teenage son, appear to be a model family. Vicki is eager to be friends, but Phoebe doesn’t quite trust her. She also suspects she’s being watched by the driver of a car that keeps returning to the neighborhood. When Phoebe receives a series of frightening notes that may have some connection to her father, she begins to fear for her life. With an impossible-to-predict plot and a very unexpected murder, Dickson’s book is required reading for suspense addicts.