About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Jason Pinter
Rave Booklist Danger is heightened by brothers Raymond and Randall Spivak, loan sharks turned murderers who use the love of mothers for their sons as leverage in their crimes. This second in the Rachel Marin series maintains the promise of the first, with full-bodied characters in a compelling plot and graphic elements leavened by doses of humanity. Not for those who prefer less-violent stories, but a sure bet for other crime-fiction readers.
Sarah Pearse
Rave Booklist ... atmospheric debut ... Pearse not only creates believably fallible characters, she also vividly portrays the frigid landscape of Le Sommet buffeted by blizzards, and a chilling epilogue cries out for a sequel. Crime-fiction readers will want to keep an eye on Pearse.
Harriet Tyce
Positive Booklist While this is a bit shorter on suspense than former barrister Tyce’s notable debut, Blood Orange (2019), it’s spot-on in capturing mother-daughter relationships and posing ethical legal questions.
Paraic O'Donnell
Positive Booklist This literary thriller, set in the late-Victorian era, received plaudits when it was published in the UK in 2018. It should be received every bit as warmly here.
Nicci French
Rave Booklist The writing team of Nicci Gerrard and Sean French delivers another winner (following The Living Room, 2019), combining an impeccably constructed, secrecy-prone English village with masterful plotting and an indefatigable protagonist who carries on, no matter the cost.
Stuart Turton
Positive Booklist A marked departure from Turton’s debut, this is a rousing, action-filled mystery. With a reading-group guide and a short author interview appended, it’s tailor-made for book groups with a taste for bloody adventure.
Micah Nemerever
Positive Booklist A debut novel, compelling in its plotting and characterizations, that plumbs emotional depths and evokes Meyer Levin’s 1956 classic Compulsion, based on the Leopold and Loeb case.
Michael Elias
Positive Booklist In a rousing climax, Elias...deftly ties together the plot threads of Nina’s personal quest and her current assignment. A compulsively readable thriller that could take Elias to another level of acclaim.
Denise Mina
Positive Library Journal Mina’s concern with the effects of class on individual lives is evident, as Margo learns about sex workers, coming to admire Susan as she ferrets out the reason for her death. As the plot gains speed to a startling and abrupt end, readers will be left agasp and wanting more.
Karin Slaughter
Rave BookPage The narrative moves between the unsolved Caterino case and the present, gathering momentum as it goes, for another riveting entry in the Will Trent series ... Slaughter adds depth to her best-selling series with the investigations of old and current cases, while also advancing the key personal relationship. Another slam dunk.
Megan Miranda
Positive Booklist Miranda, a best-selling author of thrillers for both adults and YAs, sprinkles the present-day narrative with transcripts and reports from Olivia’s past, building suspense with startling plot twists that lead to a stunning climax. Another compulsive page-turner from an accomplished author.
Mathew Carr
Rave Booklist With the help of a crime reporter and a French secret-service agent, Lawton uncovers a stunning plot with profound implications ... Carr combines fiction with fact (including historical characters). The result is a vivid portrayal of Barcelona’s \'Tragic Week\' of political and social conflict, a skillfully crafted account that is ultimately as much history as mystery.
Karen Lee Street
Rave Booklist ... macabre ... In a brisk, vivid narrative that includes magic, alchemy, metempsychosis (the transfer of souls between bodies), and the pain of loss, Street details new life for Dupin, and for Poe, a reunion with his beloved. Superlative historical mystery, capturing the tone of the time and Poe’s lasting literary legacy.
Jordan Farmer
Positive Booklist There’s a lot going on here, from murder to ecological disaster to the rock-music business to the effect of disability on one’s life. But what shines through strongest in Hollis’ first-person, often lyrical narration is the power of his art, as he comes to terms with his past and envisions a brighter future.
Kimberly McCreight
Positive Booklist McCreight fashions a plot with so many twists and turns that little is what it originally seemed, combining psychological suspense, murder investigation, and a legal thriller.
Darcey Bell
Positive Booklist Most of the story is told, alternately, from the standpoints of Charlotte and Ruth, as the truth is gradually teased from lies on the part of both parties, effectively building suspense. Bell is making domestic thrillers her trade, and this will compel readers to its surprisingly sympathetic end.
Deon Meyer
Rave Booklist Two disparate plotlines merge to form an explosive conclusion in this political thriller ... The latest Benny Griessel novel is a compelling page-turner and a searing portrait of the author’s native country.
Betty Webb
Positive Booklist There is one shock after another in Webb’s sixth Gunn Zoo mystery ... Although the murderer’s apprehension is a bit hastily executed, the charm of this series carries through, particularly with Teddy’s love and care for her animal charges, and for the humans who visit them.
Amy Engel
Rave Booklist Engel masterfully creates a milieu in which women struggle against all odds to provide the best lives possible for their daughters. Tension arises as Eve, heeding advice from her former boyfriend, an abusive meth dealer, is faced with a dreadful choice in a stunning conclusion.
John McMahon
Rave Booklist A compelling, character-driven sequel to McMahon’s stunning debut, The Good Detective (2019), this firmly establishes the author as a force in crime fiction.
Tarashea Nesbit
Positive Booklist Restoring women’s voices, primarily through Alice and Eleanor, adds a new and welcome dimension to our history, made more vivid by solid research and clear, concise prose. In Nesbit’s hands, history once again comes alive.
Lee Durkee
Positive Booklist Durkee’s prose has some rough spots but can be laugh-out-loud funny, insightful, and compassionate. This belongs with other examples of quirky cab-driver fiction like Gary Reilly’s The Asphalt Warrior (2012) and Jack Clark’s Nobody’s Angel (2010).
Clarissa Goenawan
Positive Booklist Like Goenawan’s previous Rainbirds ... this is more literary fiction than conventional mystery, featuring exceptionally well-drawn characters facing adversity in a narrative written with an elegance and delicacy appropriate to its Japanese setting.
Sarah Perry
Positive Booklist What compels the reader most in this tale of obsession, guilt, and love, with a religious underpinning, is the dreamlike atmosphere that Perry conjures in the most elegant of prose ... A treat for Perry fans and all readers who appreciate ambiguity.
Luanne Rice
Rave Booklist In a family drama that is suspenseful as it is empathetic, Rice again displays her ability to portray female friendship and the pain of loss.
Lisa Gardner
Rave Booklist A frightening climax provides an appropriate wrap-up to the Ness saga and the story of evil flourishing in a small mountain town. This is top-notch suspense by a best-selling master of the genre.
Raymond Fleischmann
Positive Booklist ... [a] compelling debut ... a pulse-pounding climax. Fleischmann proves to be an author to watch on the literary-thriller scene.
Christopher Fowler
Positive Booklist There’s nothing funny about murder, much less serial murders, yet readers can count on a few lighthearted, even laugh-out-loud, moments ... A significant entry in a series that’s as entertaining as it is eccentric.
Mark de Castrique
Positive Booklist Someone trying to bury the past kills again and threatens Blackman and Robertson before the full, convoluted scheme, involving more decades-old murder and espionage, is revealed. A fellow army vet advises Blackman that \'Disinformation creates doubt, chaos breeds confusion,\' words that also show this solid entry in the Sam Blackman series to be particularly pertinent today.
Jason Pinter
Rave Booklist Pinter does a masterful job of ramping up suspense about the Marin family’s past and the current case, spinning an absolutely riveting plot with a cast of full-bodied, fallible characters, in what seems the start of a promising series. Fans of both domestic thrillers and police procedurals should get in at the start.
J. P. Smith
Positive Booklist In clear prose, Smith spins out a sensuous, sinuous psychological thriller that compels attention to the final line.
J. T. Ellison
Positive Booklist A strict school honor code to the contrary, Goode girls do lie, though few as significantly as Ash, whose story is told only after a third death at the school. An intriguing plot, featuring a final twist, shows what can happen when hidden truths are revealed.
Burt Solomon
Positive Booklist Best of all, Hay is a fallible, engaging character with interests in boxing and poetry as well as sleuthing, and his narration brings to life a time and place as it unravels a crime.
Teresa Dovalpage
Positive Booklist Cuba shines here, as Havana native Dovalpage contrasts its politics and society over a generation, making this a good bet for armchair travelers as well as mystery buffs.
Jamie Mason
Rave Booklist Mason...is wonderfully adept at creating multifaceted characters in emotionally complex relationships. Little black and white for these characters—just multiple shades of gray, causing readers to temper their allegiances as the plot thunders to its conclusion. Masterfully nuanced crime fiction.
Catriona McPherson
Positive Booklist Finnie Lamb is a stalwart character who brings a quiet religious tone in the face of death to this enthralling stand-alone from McPherson, also the author of the Dandy Gilver series.
Deborah Crombie
Positive Booklist The eighteenth entry in this best-selling series is notable for its portrayals of Duncan and Gemma’s children (especially the oldest, Kit), and for the addition of food as an item of interest, a factor that will extend the appeal from the series’ procedural-loving fan base to the foodie mystery crowd. This character-driven series just continues to get better.
Nicci French
Rave Booklist This stand-alone...delivers engaging characters, a complex story, and steadily increasing suspense. International best-seller French belongs on every thriller fan’s TBR list.
Nicola Upson
Positive Booklist Upson’s eighth Josephine Tey mystery intriguingly combines murder with stories of love in the face of hateful bias. A notable addition to this fine series.
Bart Paul
Positive Booklist In clean, spare prose, Paul spins a plot of understated but still startling violence, as Smith does what he must to protect his family and stay alive himself. The third entry in the Tommy Smith series is a fine western thriller with a tender heart.
Linwood Barclay
Positive Booklist ... a heart-stopping climax ... Barclay adds depth and interest with the backstories of many of his characters and the relationships between them, but this is primarily an all-stops-out thriller that will keep readers’ pulses pounding, particularly those of the acrophobes among us.
Carl Shuker
Positive Booklist New Zealand author Shuker...presents a concise portrayal of the consequences of mistakes that result in the loss of life, along the way displaying knowledge about medical practices and the difficulties facing a woman entering a man’s world. An intriguing account of irresponsibility and its aftermath.
Amy Stewart
Positive Booklist Told in Stewart’s nimble, witty prose, this fifth in the popular series is based largely on fact and offers a paean to patriotism and the role women have played in war, even a century ago. Devoted fans will be pleased with the tantalizing hint Stewart provides about what lies ahead for Constance.
Sandie Jones
Positive Booklist Jones...surprises everyone with the revelations in her powerful climactic close, which presents Alice with a fateful choice. A provocative view of trust, placed and misplaced.
Hank Phillippi Ryan
Positive Booklist A compelling legal thriller from the popular author of the Jane Ryland mystery series, this will have readers’ sympathies shifting from one character to another as it winds to an unsettling end.
Sarah Lotz
Positive Booklist In a narrative sprinkled with threads of texts, Lotz delves into her characters’ backgrounds, clarifying the obsessive behavior that drives some of them. A satisfying thriller that’s both quirky and macabre.
Catherine Ryan Howard
Positive Booklist Howard...labels her chapters Play, Pause, Fast Forward, and Rewind, as the chronology shifts, a structure that becomes more disconcerting than helpful. That aside, this is an involving tale of obsession, blackmail, and murder, and Howard remains a writer whom thriller fans should check out.
Julia Keller
Rave Booklist Keller’s Bell Elkins series sets a standard for its evocation of place and for the sensitive portrayals of its characters, with Bell the most masterfully drawn of all. This is introspective, literary crime fiction at its best.
Michael Robotham
Rave Booklist This sensitive, suspenseful mystery firmly establishes Robotham...in the top ranks of psychological-thriller writers. And it cries out for a sequel.
T. Marie Vandelly
Positive Booklist Vandelly shows a deft touch at creating characters and spinning plots, leading to an almost unbearably terrifying and bloody climax in this gripping debut.
Karin Slaughter
Rave Booklist ... cause for celebration by fans of Slaughter, in particular, and of crime fiction in general ... the depth of the relationship between Will and Sara is also vividly portrayed. With familiar characters, further developed here, and a plot as timely as it is riveting, Slaughter’s latest will enthrall her ever-growing legion of fans.
Jonathan Moore
Positive Booklist This is perhaps less terrifying than Moore’s loosely linked San Francisco triptych, which concluded with The Night Market (2018), but it’s just as suspenseful and skillfully plotted. Noir fans who don’t know Moore have some catching up to do.
Kristen Lepionka
Positive Booklist If the cases in this third mystery are less compelling than those earlier in the series, Roxane herself, a remarkably well-drawn and interestingly flawed character, continues to command interest.
Javier Marías Trans. by Margaret Jull Costa
Rave Booklist Acclaimed author Marías has been described as a novelist posing as a philosopher—but one who surprises readers by providing a plot, after all. And so it is in this novel about a marriage imbued with secrecy ... What the future holds is revealed gradually in Marías’ signature prose, with large chunks of exposition that may initially be off-putting, but through which the narrative flows smoothly, engulfing the reader. Marías has been touted as a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature; this novel illustrates why.
Martin Clark
Positive Booklist A retired judge, Clark veers a bit into the weeds with Moore’s maneuvering of the law, but his clear prose and well-drawn characters carry the day in this solid legal thriller.
Helen Phillips
Positive Booklist Phillips teases out this tension to an almost unbearable level ... Phillips explores issues of identity, responsibility, the burden of constant alertness for the sake of young children and their safety, and the relief of sharing this burden. But central to it all is the absolutely fierce love a mother has for her children, a love beside which everything else pales. A skilfully crafted, thought-provoking domestic thriller best for readers willing to embrace ambiguity.
Herman Koch
Positive Booklist A compelling exploration by a master stylist of what jealousy and distrust can do even to a solid relationship.
Barbara Bourland
Rave Library Journal The creative process confronts reality in this compelling literary thriller centering on art, identity, and deception, as told in Bourland’s sharp prose. A must for those with an artistic bent, a sheer reading pleasure for all.
Chandler Baker
Rave Booklist In the midst of a police investigation and meetings involving suits and countersuits, Baker works in succinct statements about the quandaries of modern women: torn between motherhood and work, plagued with guilt about nearly everything, suppressing their femininity while being undervalued because of their sex, and schooled in secrecy. These truths serve to bolster the plot, not distract from it, and the result is a compulsively readable mystery with a strong message. Don’t miss it.
Erica Ferencik
Positive Booklist Ferencik, who spent a month living in the Amazon, focuses on an untested woman needing to prove herself and survive in an alien environment. With its vividly evoked jungle setting, this is a riveting narrative that finds a fresh way to remind us that life is precious .
Laird Barron
Rave Booklist Coleridge is a large, unbelievably strong, scarred man—a thug, yes, but a thinking-person’s thug—who may recover physically but still has to face his nights. Readers with a tolerance for violence will want to meet him.
Christopher Reich
Positive Booklist Reich’s solid tradecraft and nonstop action are humanized by the hint of a relationship of the heart and by the presence of Vika’s 12-year-old son, who becomes a skilfully played pawn. A stylish international thriller.
Yannick Haenel Trans. by Teresa Fagan
Positive Booklist \"This wildly ambitious novel audaciously layers on metaphors that explore truth, film and art, and the essence of life. The narrator is unreliable in multiple ways, but that is apparently the price of pursuing a vision of greatness. From the author of The Messenger (2012), this demanding novel tracks one man’s profound journey.\
Andrea Bartz
Rave Booklist Bartz calls upon psychology and technology as Lindsay, whose profession is research and fact-checking, uncovers the truth. A riveting debut with, yes, an echo of The Girl on the Train​.
Helene Tursten Trans. by Paul Norlen
Rave Booklist A riveting climax. Embla, still plagued by nightmares about losing her teenage best friend, is a sharp, willful, though emotionally vulnerable detective. Fans of the Huss novels in particular and Nordic noir in general will want to follow this series from its start.
Sophie Hannah
Mixed Booklist Accusations of misogyny aside, this tenth in the Waterhouse-Zailer series has a lighter tone than others and a motive that seems insufficient for taking multiple lives. Still, it’s a wonderfully played-out puzzle, with food for thought about the importance of books.
Eleanor Kuhns
Positive Booklist This sixth Will Rees entry illuminates post-Revolutionary Shaker life, providing backstory that gives Rees nightmares, as it hints at the future for the family in this readable historical-mystery series.
Harriet Tyce
Rave Booklist This debut novel by a former barrister displays the pacing skills and smooth prose of a seasoned author, as suspense builds to a stunning climax. Keep your eyes on Tyce.
Laura Benedict
Positive Booklist Benedict spins a story driven by deceit on the part of most of the principals, with tension increasing with the body count and the twists and turns that continue to the very end.
Jane Corry
Positive Booklist Unexpected twists to the final page. Corry’s skill at building suspense and creating characters with secret pasts, as shown in her earlier novels is on display again here.
Charles Finch
Rave Booklist Fans of the series, which set the earlier Lenox novels in the 1860s, will know what’s coming in the detective’s personal and professional life, but that in no way decreases the pleasure of this account of his earlier life. Finch’s nimble prose, edged with humor, makes this twelfth in the Charles Lenox series a pure delight.
Sandra Newman
Positive Booklist The narrative toggles between the modern and Elizabethan ages, with vivid accounts of the latter including Emilia’s growing relationship with Will Shakespeare, and snaps back to Ben’s reality on 9/11. In this tender love story, Newman ponders the impact of individual action on the world as she creates alternative universes, realities, even endings. Fiction as provocative as it is ambiguous.
John McMahon
Rave Booklist This unusually accomplished debut is the first in a projected series; with Marsh still having demons to deal with, the table is set for much more compelling, character-centric stories to come. Crime-fiction fans are advised to get in at the start.
H. M. Naqvi
Rave Booklist This exuberant account, featuring a protagonist as unlikely as he is appealing, is a true pleasure for its language and discourses on life, death, and what’s in between. The footnotes that stud the narrative and the appended family tree and glossary are both entertaining and erudite, as is this unusual novel itself.
Lyndsay Faye
Rave Booklist Faye once again vividly illuminates history with her fiction ... While the violence of Mafia rule is nothing new, Oregon’s deeply racist past is lesser known, and both are brought to life in this remarkably fluid fiction, framed as a love letter and based in fact.
Joann Chaney
Positive Booklist Chaney expertly toggles the narrative between 1995 and 2018 to gradually reveal the truth. Marriage laid bare, with a riveting account of evasion and pursuit—and a zinger of a coda.
Sarah Bailey
Positive Booklist Woodstock, introduced in Bailey’s debut, The Dark Lake​ (2017), is a splendidly complex and fallible character ... Readers will want to see more of Woodstock.
Rachel Ingalls
Rave Booklist Outstanding if underappreciated ... In clear, elegant prose, Ingalls vividly evokes both the city life of London and the wilderness of Africa, each beautiful in its way, as she explores myth and the human-animal link. With its memorable characters, who face life in their own ways, this is haunting fiction that will linger in memory.
Bryan Gruley
Positive Booklist ...intricately plotted ... Gruley gradually reveals connections between characters and their secrets as he builds suspense in this impressively constructed plot about attaining justice for those once wronged.
Christopher Fowler
Positive Booklist [A] narrative veering between laugh-out-loud funny to macabre (a body in a macerator, murder by knitting needle). This fifteenth Bryant and May outing concludes with an updating on the lives of all the characters. Could this signal an end to the long-running, eccentric, and consistently entertaining series? Let’s hope not.
Allen Eskens
Positive Booklist This may lack some of the tension of Eskens’ debut, but murder, arson, betrayal, and reconciliation will keep pages turning and leave readers eager for more of Joe Talbert.
P. J. Vernon
Positive Booklist Long-buried secrets are revealed as action accelerates to a climax, with a chilling final sentence. This gripping debut marks Vernon as a name to watch in the thriller genre.
Caroline Hulse
Positive Booklist An entertaining, tongue-in-cheek tale of people who are the adults, after all.
William Brodrick
Rave Booklist Despite being labeled as such, this is less a thriller in the traditional sense than an intricate, sensitive, and nuanced account of fallible human beings doing their best to atone as necessary and get on with life. In Brodrick’s skilled hands, it is compelling fiction that will draw readers across genres.
Andrew Michael Hurley
Positive Booklist One story begets another, some of them painful, in this atmospheric account of three landholding families battling the vagaries of the natural and the supernatural on the Endlands, in the rugged Lancashire moors ... Hurley...seamlessly weaves in backstory and fleshes out accounts of the isolated rural life and the horror it seems to engender ... Like Hurley’s celebrated debut, this beautifully told gothic story of love, obligation, and legacy blends genres superbly. Hurley is considered one of the leading figures in what is called the British folk-horror revival.
Idra Novey
Positive Booklist Novey...creates a landscape in which her characters may represent, or sometimes hide, their nation, class, or station in life. Yet her women overcome such barriers and join together, revealing what they know in order to effect change. With its unnamed locales and spare prose, the novel becomes a modern parable that allows readers to unearth deeper meanings.
Anthony Horowitz
Positive Booklist ...a bold move ... This explosive adventure is Horowitz’s second Bond book, after Trigger Mortis (2015), and marks him as fully worthy to carry on the Bond tradition. Fleming would be pleased.
Ed Lin
Positive Booklist \"Even when life is threatened, Lin displays a humorous touch in this third entry in the Taipei Night Market series as he comments on Taiwanese society, food, and immigration, an issue everywhere. Top-notch international crime fiction that will have readers dreaming of a visit to the Taipei market.\
Lisa Unger
Positive Booklist As Unger builds suspense, blurring the lines between dreams and reality, she considers how well one person can ever know another, as secrets abound. Another fine psychological thriller from a master of the genre.
Algonquin Books
Positive Booklist Online In an intricate dance between three characters, Luloff explores memory and its importance in forming identity. Claire, Charlie, and Rachel have been indispensable to each other for years. But the relationship is knocked askew when Claire, a journalist on assignment in India, contracts Japanese B encephalitis, experiencing high fevers, seizures, central-nervous-system damage, and a \'smudge\' where her memories, from late teens to the present, are supposed to be ... From Luloff, this is a thought-provoking exploration of love, relationships, and the role of the past in defining the present.
Julia Keller
Positive Booklist Drug addiction in Acker’s Gap, West Virginia, which was at the center of Keller’s previous series entry...is again the prime mover here. But there’s much more going on, notably in the life of protagonist Bell Elkins ... Keller can spin a mystery plot with the best of them, but it’s her full-bodied characters and the regard they have for one another that really sets her crime fiction apart: a bride’s back-of-the-hand caress of her new husband’s cheek, and his response, is a moment that will linger in memory long after the crime is solved.
Catherine Coulter
Positive Booklist Action is nonstop in this latest entry in Coulter’s FBI Thriller series (after Enigma, 2017). Perfect reading for the beach and beyond.
Lea Carpenter
Rave Booklist ...an appropriately subtle espionage tale, told in spare prose ... This novel is to literature what pointillism is to art, with dots that combine to make a whole picture, one that merges a moving love story with details of a profession that, by its nature, involves both loyalty and duplicity. A stunner.
David Joy
Rave Booklist \"Joy has proved adept with southern noir in his first two novels ... and he nails it again here, in the actions of characters who act as they must, for the sake of family and friendship, given their nature. This is fiction as beautiful and compelling as it is searing.
Anne Holt, Trans. by Anne Bruce
Positive Booklist As the two detectives pursue their respective assignments, the cases link in a surprising fashion. In this tenth and final book in the Hanne Wilhelmsen series, Wilhelmsen is as intuitive, and prickly, as ever, as Holt explores further the relationship between Wilhelmsen and Holme. For fans of Jo Nesbø, who has noted Holt’s primacy in Norwegian crime fiction, and of the genre in general.
Darcey Bell
Positive Booklist Debut-novelist Bell ramps up suspense with authority in this domestic thriller, in which actions seem as inevitable as they are chilling. The audience that made Gone Girl a publishing sensation is likely to take to this one, too.
Ashley Dyer
Positive Booklist Online The case of the Thorn Killer, who uses thorns to elaborately tattoo his female victims, obsesses Liverpool DCI Greg Carver. He’s keeping his own case files at home and is drinking too much, prompting his wife, Emma, to move out ... the Thorn Killer’s latest victim however resembles Emma and was wearing a pair of Emma’s earrings ... Suspense fiction by a knowledgeable duo.
Emma Healey
Positive Booklist Healey...fashions this novel in titled sections, ranging in length from a few lines to a few pages, a technique that advances the narration, along with flashbacks, while eliminating extraneous details and building suspense naturally. The result is an absorbing view of a family, with the emphasis on the mother-daughter connection, in which—flaws aside—love shines through.
Rob McCarthy
Rave Booklist \"Medical student McCarthy has created humane, fallible characters—notably Kent and Noble, who struggle with addictions—as he spins a taut plot that’s part police procedural, part medical thriller. An unbeatable combination for what’s shaping up as a winning series.\
Mick Herron
Rave Booklist Herron’s sharp wit makes the Slough House novels something special, his team of maverick spies bringing a delightful, freewheeling edge to the genre. This is prime spy fiction with more than a touch of wry.
Michelle Sacks
Positive Booklist An insightful and skillfully constructed novel, with three alternating narrators, this will keep readers rapt to the final page.
Fuminori Nakamura, Trans. by Kalau Almony
Rave Booklist \"Taking as his inspiration the 1995 sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway, award-winning author Nakamura weaves together politics, religion, and science—including biology, cosmology, and quantum physics—into a fascinating noir brimming with insightful commentary on totalitarianism that is especially apt for our times.\
Ben Dolnick
Positive Booklist In his previous novels, Dolnick has examined meaningful episodes in his characters’ lives; here, in this compelling mix of love story, detective story, and ghost story, he takes a haunting look at what might follow life.
Elizabeth George
Rave Booklist The sheer size of this book (more than 700 pages) shouldn’t dissuade readers: bolstered by George’s polished prose, the twentieth Lynley mystery moves briskly along, showing the author at the peak of her powers.
Ramona Ausubel
Positive Booklist In vivid, precisely fashioned language, Ausubel spans the globe, from the tropics to the Arctic, in these 11 stories ... Sometimes Ausubel poses mind-bending questions: What if a Cyclops, looking for love, registered on an online dating site? What if the mayor of a stagnating Minnesota town offered a car to the mother of the first baby born on Lenin’s birthday? Vibrant stories that expand horizons and mind.
Tess Sharpe
Rave Booklist Sharpe has fashioned a pulse-pounding thriller with a strong moral underpinning and a wrenching love interest, in which Harley’s contemporary activities are interspersed with her bloody backstory. Strong, graphic violence may limit the appeal of this masterfully written and constructed novel, but Harley McKenna is a striking protagonist and, with her powerful debut, Sharpe is definitely a name to watch.
Zachary Lazar
Positive Booklist A vivid and unblinking view of the justice and penal systems in modern America.
Christopher Bollen
Positive Booklist While Bollen’s plot sometimes strains credibility, his characters are vividly drawn, his prose sometimes sings, and his Greek island setting is intoxicating.