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It’s Private Eye July at BookPage! This month, we’re celebrating the sinister side of fiction with the year’s best mysteries and thrillers. Look for the Private Eye July magnifying glass for a dose of murder, espionage and all those creepy neighbors with even creepier secrets.

No doubt there are a multitude of mystery readers out there who love digging into classic spy stories from the golden age of espionage. Filled with ritzy postwar ballrooms, foggy alleyways and the smell of gunpowder, these stories conjure up boatloads of thrilling nostalgia, one swishing trench coat at a time. But have you ever imagined a Cold War that plays out in both this life and the afterlife? Or contemplated world powers vying for demonic runes in their quest for influence? Both of these supernatural mysteries excel at taking a familiar genre and time period and augmenting them with just enough otherworldly elements to make each page feel new and exciting.

In Hannu Rajaniemi’s Summerland, it’s 1938, and England and Russia are poised at the brink of war. Each has deployed a large number of spies to survey and counter the other’s covert operations around the world. Rachel White, an English operative, learns from a Russian asset that there’s a mole in British intelligence. After clashing with her superiors and being thrown back to a desk job, she takes it upon herself to bring him to justice, even if it’s off the record. But there’s a problem. Peter Bloom, the Russian traitor, doesn’t live on Earth. In fact, he doesn’t “live” at all. Peter is already dead and working as a spy in Summerland, an ethereal city filled with recently deceased souls. How do you expose a mole who isn’t even alive?

What’s so great about Rajeniemi’s writing is how much sympathy he engenders for both Rachel and Peter. This split-perspective novel had me nonplussed at first, as I assumed there would be a “right” and “wrong” spelled out for the reader. This wasn’t the case at all. Peter’s painful past and his dedication to the mission of communism make him a sympathetic figure. Rachel has a great deal of pain, too, as a woman in a man’s world, as wife to a husband with PTSD and as someone who just wants justice. Summerland also poses questions about the cost of knowing the afterlife exists. What is a life really worth if we knew there is somewhere else to go? Contemplative, exciting and utterly imaginative, it’s a wild ride for readers who want some sci-fi twists in their thrillers.

In Nick Setchfield’s dark, lightning-quick The War in the Dark, an English spy named Christopher Winter encounters a demon living inside a human. After battling the monster, being attacked by his dead partner and betrayed by his wife, he goes rogue, trying to understand what his colleague Malcolm tells him—there’s an entirely other war being fought here. The world powers are waging an occult war over the runes of power, which are ancient words that drive these supernatural beings. With the tenuous aid of a Russian KGB agent named Karina, Winter must try to navigate Cold War politics and avert the destruction caused by unholy, recently awakened forces.

The War in the Dark is a tight, high-intensity spook-fest that never wavers from its vision. Setchfield is a master at choosing just the right word to remind us where we are and how we should feel. The reader may rarely get a chance to breathe, but this breathlessness is invigorating. Set in 1963, The War in the Dark uses a more traditional noir aesthetic than the post-WWI Summerland as a foundation for its supernatural elements. And these elements are unequivocally creepy. Exploding demons, sacrificial bleeding wheels and faceless visions feel right at home in the fantasy genre. But Winter’s perspective grounds us with his dry wit and spy’s tenacity. Seekers of supernatural thrillers will find both familiar and entirely new elements in Setchfield’s deftly written, atmospheric spy caper.

There are plenty of science fiction books that tell stories of people voyaging to a new beginning, filled with intrigue, dystopias and subjugation. Relic and Record of a Spaceborn Few don’t tell those stories. Perfect for fans of both science and literary fiction, both books deal with what comes after humans have found their place in the stars.

Alan Dean Foster’s Relic tells a thoughtful story of survival. Once a midlevel administrator on the planet of Sebaroth, Ruslan is now the last of his kind. Homo sapiens—a species that had once settled countless worlds—has been destroyed by a disease of its own making, the Aura Malignance. Alone and miraculously disease-free, Ruslan has been given a new home by the Myssari, tripedal aliens whose enthusiasm for “human studies” is only outweighed by their politeness. When Myssari scientists decide they wish to clone Ruslan to reestablish his species, Ruslan is given a choice. While the aliens will not stop the cloning program out of deference for Ruslan’s feelings, they do want his willing cooperation. In exchange for the willing donation of his genetic material, the Myssari agree to look for humans’ ancient home world, a place called Earth.

Foster’s book reads like a slow, methodical mystery, building to something that isn’t quite clear until the last pages. While the discussions of Ruslan’s continued existence and the intricacies of his relationships with the blunt, three-gendered Myssari could have been tedious, Relic is anything but. It is nuanced, with a surprise lurking behind every shadow, making it impossible to put down. Foster’s story also strikingly echoes our own world, where we fight tooth and nail to avoid losing species, even if it means those species live out the rest of their days in dreary captivity. Ruslan’s experience asks, if it were us, would we want the same? Relic will not just keep you entertained. It will keep you thinking.

Becky Chambers’ Record of a Spaceborn Few, the third installment in her Wayfarers universe, tells the story of an entire fleet, as opposed to Relic’s solitary survivor. Hundreds of years after humans left Earth to find a better home, the Exodus Fleet has settled in a new solar system, locked into orbit around a new star and been accepted into the greater galactic community. Most Exodans have left the Fleet, determined to make their homes planetside. Record of a Spaceborn Few tells the stories of a few people who chose to stay in the Fleet, torn between integrating into greater galactic life and preserving the only way of life they have ever known. When an accident destroys one of the Fleet’s homesteader ships, its remaining residents are forced to struggle with what it means to still be an Exodan now that the Exodus is over.

Chambers’ characters are beautifully drawn, and they seem like they could be people next door as much as they could be people from a galaxy away. Her writing allows the reader to inhabit those nuacned characters with feeling, but without maudlin sentimentality or forced emotion. The result is an experience that will leave lovers of both science and literary fiction wishing they had just one more chapter to go back to.