Blanche Potter thought she had put her past behind her. She never talked about what happened when she was 7 years old. She changed her last name. She moved to a new city. She started a life of her own. But as the daughter of Chuck Varner, a deranged mass shooter, Blanche realizes the past may be buried, but it never goes away completely. Blanche learns that lesson the hard way in Nathan Ripley’s shocking new novel, Your Life Is Mine. Things are going well in her career as an up-and-coming filmmaker when she is told that her estranged mother, Crissy, has been shot and killed at her trailer home. News of Crissy’s death, brought to Blanche by a sleazy journalist who knows of her past, opens the floodgates of her memories and traumatic childhood. But as she tries to reconcile her past experiences with the recent death of her mother, someone else is gunning for her as well. The cult of Chuck Varner lives on, and it’s up to Blanche to stop it before his crazed follower can strike again. Ripley pulls no punches here, creating a tense and atmospheric story of personal identity and survival, while asking whether you can ever escape your past.

Delve into the heart of the Amazon in Erica Ferencik’s second action-packed thriller, Into the Jungle.

In 2010, while living in a hostel in Cochabamba, Bolivia, Lily Bushwold, a Boston native, meets Omar, an Amazon hunter turned motorcycle mechanic. Two scrappy yet tender kindred spirits, they quickly fall in love. When Omar is summoned back to his jungle village, Ayachero, to avenge his mourning family, Lily accompanies him. Little does she know it’s not just Omar she follows, but a mystical calling to discover her ca’ah, her life’s purpose, intrinsically bound up with the fragile jungle ecosystem.

A mosh pit of unexpected experiences, the jungle is not unlike Lily’s turbulent childhood, which she spent bouncing from foster home to foster home. Her character develops in the steamy cocoon of jungle extremes. On one hand, in the 10 months Lily spends in the jungle, she’s rained down upon by tarantulas, infected by sand flies, made to gut freshly hunted game (she’s a vegetarian) and squeezed by a python. On the other hand, she is befriended by a pig, macaws and an orphan boy, Tuti. She learns to harvest the poison of tree frogs. The pages of Into the Jungle teem with fascinating flora and fauna.

Densely packed, sensational scenes are offset by thoughtful engagement. Lily and Omar give each other “assignments” as a way to get to know one another. She communicates with the controversial shaman, Beya, in a way no one else can. Lily and For God’s Sake, the able river navigator, discuss ca’ah and the fate of the jungle. The village suspects Lily of being on the side of poachers and loggers threatening the jungle, and she must find cunning ways to distinguish herself from these greedy messengers of civilization and prove herself capable of the villagers’ respect.

A chilling journey into jungle life, Into the Jungle is also a deep probe into environmental ethics and love.

Two complex women inhabit Anna Pitoniak’s second psychologically astute novel, Necessary People—recent college graduates who’ve become the closest of friends, though they’re opposites in so many ways.

Stella Bradley comes from a wealthy New York family, has two doting parents and a home on Long Island Sound featuring a carriage house, a pear orchard, a swimming pool and a dock stretching out into the water. Not much of a student, she enrolls at a small New England college because, in her own words, she’s “rich, and lazy.” Violet Trapp was raised by abusive parents in a “mildewed apartment with roaches” in Tallahassee. She’s an outstanding student who turns down a full scholarship to Duke against her counselor’s advice. Instead, she picks a school based solely on a five-minute conversation with Stella during orientation.

Violet spends holidays and summers with the Bradleys, and after graduation, she and Stella share an apartment in New York City, mostly funded by Stella’s parents. Violet follows her love of journalism to an internship at a new TV channel, King Cable News. She quickly rises through the ranks, becoming an assistant and then assistant producer. She loves the challenge and relishes the sense of accomplishment she experiences as her work is recognized by those above her on the network ladder.

Stella, however, is floundering—spending her parents’ money “like it was water,” her days “a chick-lit fantasy come alive,” in Violet’s own words. When Stella’s brother tells Violet that Stella is actually jealous of her, Violet doesn’t believe it at first. But then Stella uses one of her mother’s lofty connections to land a job at King News, and her beauty and outgoing personality catapult her to an anchor job, overshadowing Violet’s hard-earned accomplishments.

Their longtime friendship gives way to ambition, each one feeling threatened by the other’s success. Pitoniak perceptively traces the fracture of Violet and Stella’s sisterlike bond, leading to a denouement the reader will not anticipate. The author’s insightful glimpse into the competitive world of television news, as well as her spot-on portraits of these two ambitious women, come together in an emotional, gripping novel sure to become a popular summer read.

Annie Ward’s debut has all the familiar ingredients of the recent outpouring of psychological thrillers—dynamic but unreliable female narrators, a story that bounces between different characters’ perspectives, and secrets that remain buried throughout years of friendship or marriage—but it’s set apart by its unusual settings.

Maddie and Jo met as high school students on a summer exchange program in Spain. After college graduation, Maddie is in Bulgaria, teaching English at Sofia University, and Jo is an aid worker based in Skopje, Macedonia, a five-hour bus ride from Sofia. In 2001, the third pivotal character arrives in the midst of Jo and Maddie’s sojourn overseas: Ian Wilson, a security officer serving in the British army. Both women are fascinated by Ian, especially Maddie, who seems to be obsessed with him. Jo and Ian’s fling is brief, leaving Jo bitter and convinced that Ian is hiding evil underneath his humanitarian facade. Maddie continues to harbor feelings for him, even over years with little communication. Eventually, when Maddie returns to New York, she and Ian reconnect, which leads to their marriage in 2012. They move to her hometown of Meadowlark, Kansas—the only place where Ian feels he can cope with everyday life after the horrors he experienced in Bosnia and Rwanda—and start a family together.

Interspersed with these events are chapters from “The Day of the Killing,” though the reader doesn’t know the identities of the victim or killer. Maddie has suffered head injuries twice in her life, which may have affected her brain, and Ian suffers from PTSD. But which one is sick enough to commit a brutal murder?

A twist in the closing pages will catch even the most jaded reader off guard, making Beautiful Bad a good read for fans of Gillian Flynn, Paula Hawkins and A.J. Finn. 

MDT-48 is an experimental drug designed by the CIA during its infamous Project MK-Ultra, which was developed to unlock the full potential of the human mind. Ned Sweeney is an unassuming, milquetoast account manager at an advertising firm. When the man and the drug are combined in a clandestine experiment, Sweeney becomes something else, a madcap machine of computation and prediction, dazzling random strangers in bars, accompanying Dylan Thomas on a bender and spending a few hours holed up with Marlon Brando and Marilyn Monroe. But the subsequent crash leaves him despondent, confused and with a debilitating craving for more. Half a century later, Sweeney’s grandson Ray has been told his grandfather committed suicide. But an offhand remark from a retired government official upends that story. Ray begins leveraging his contacts as a political operative to dig into his grandfather’s past, embarking on a search that will change his life forever.

Project MK-Ultra is not fiction, and author Alan Glynn ably contends with the ever-changing boundary between human enhancement and treatment that both that project and modern pharmaceutical developments imply. Furthermore, Glynn’s writing is as sharp as ever, conjuring tension and drama fit for an action film out of what is essentially a political thriller. His characters, especially the cantankerous Clay Proctor, are compelling and memorable, and they are well deployed. Receptor’s sole failing is that its plot can move a touch too quickly, rushing through relationships and romances in ways that limit their credibility. But Glynn’s dramatic instinct is maintained throughout. The potential of MDT-48 is demonstrated with flashbacks to Ned Sweeney’s story, and the circumstances of his death are revealed as they happened, not in a retrospective or historical narrative. Glynn unfailing obeys the rule of showing rather than telling, and does so with memorable elegance. Perhaps his chief accomplishment in Receptor is his ability to shift the language of his dialogue. Ned Sweeney is almost aggressively bland for the most part, but speaks in kaleidoscopic swirls of persuasive fervour when on MDT-48.

All told, for anybody who enjoyed The Dark Fields (now titled Limitless) and wants a fast-paced thriller that still has time to question the morality of medical enhancement, Receptor would make an excellent choice.

Lisa Jewell’s domestic thrillers regularly show up on bestseller lists, and her latest, Watching You, should be no exception. The mysterious murder at its center unfolds gradually, as piece by piece the past and present relationships between her intriguing cast of characters begin to fit together.

Tom Fitzwilliam is the new headmaster of the Melville Academy in Bristol, England, and he’s called Superhead by the local newspaper due to his many postings to failing schools and his reputation for quickly turning them around. Tom lives with his wife, Nicola, in an upscale neighborhood. Nicola is an enigmatic, unhappy woman with a troubled past. Their only child, 14-year-old Freddie, believes he has Asperger’s. He hopes to work for MI5 one day and spends all his free time spying on the neighbors from his upstairs window, documenting what he sees with his camera and keeping a logbook of the neighborhood comings and goings.

One of Freddie’s voyeuristic targets is Joey Mullen, a young woman who lives two doors down from the Fitzwilliams. Joey is newly married and drifting from job to job. She and her husband live with Joey’s older brother, Jack, a physician, and his wife, Rebecca, a “strait-laced systems analyst.” Rebecca is pregnant, but she’s apparently not overjoyed about becoming a mother. Joey is completely smitten with Tom Fitzwilliam and begins planning how to meet him “accidentally,” which is all documented by Freddie’s watchful eyes.

Sixteen-year-old Jenna, a student at the Academy, and her mother live nearby, and they’re also subjects of Freddie’s surveillance. Jenna’s mother, who increasingly shows signs of paranoia, seems to believe she saw the Fitzwilliam family on holiday years ago, and that they were involved in an unpleasant incident that she can’t quite remember.

From the novel’s early pages, Jewell includes excerpts from police interviews conducted at the Bristol police station. The reader knows someone has been murdered but not their identity. Little by little, Jewell sprinkles clues about the pasts of each of her characters, and these hidden connections to the victim may turn out to be motives to commit murder. But only near the end does one suspect emerge as the killer—and a shocking final revelation completely takes the reader by surprise.

Jewell’s latest will be quickly devoured by readers of Gillian Flynn, A.J. Finn and Ruth Ware.

This article was originally published in the January 2019 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

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.