1) "The Keeper of Lost Causes" by Jussi Adler-Olsen
Great news for fans who feared that the formula that shot Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy to the top of international bestseller lists couldn’t be cloned: a big, leisurely Scandinavian thriller with dark hints of conspiracy, clunky descriptions, dozens of plot complications and the world’s most unnuanced villains.
Five years after Danish stateswoman Merete Lynggaard vanished without a trace from a ferry crossing, Carl Mørck takes it upon himself to reopen the case. Despite the possible presence of an eyewitness, Merete’s unreachably brain-damaged younger brother Uffe, the mystery has long been dismissed as unsolvable by the Copenhagen police, who think Merete must simply have slipped off the boat for reasons unknown. But Carl’s in an unusually strong position to pick it up again. Banished to Department Q, his own personal cold-case unit, after a shooting left one of his best friends dead, another paralyzed and Carl himself with an incapacitating case of survivor’s guilt and rage, he can choose his cases, control his budget and call on police departments throughout Denmark for help. And he’ll need plenty of help, because the disappearance of Merete, who against all odds is still alive, held captive by a sociopathic family mad for revenge against the inoffensive minister, is only one of the problems he’ll face. His colleagues produce painful new leads on the shooting that annihilated his own team; he’s determined to put the moves on police crisis counselor Mona Ibsen, whose agenda emphatically doesn’t include his romantic overtures; and he can’t help growing suspicious of his remarkably talented new assistant, especially since he bears the name Hafez al-Assad. The trail to the truth is filled with authentically tedious loose ends and dead ends; the climactic confrontation with the monstrous malefactors is cathartically violent; and the final scene is unexpectedly touching.
The English-language success of Adler-Olsen’s synthetic but sharply calculated debut, already a publishing phenomenon in Germany, Austria and its native Denmark, seems so assured that resistance would be futile.
2) "Never Look Away" by Linwood Barclay
Suspicion falls roundly on a small-town reporter when his wife disappears from a family outing to an amusement park.
Jan Harwood had been acting strangely for some time before she disappeared, telling her husband David how much better off he and their son Ethan would be without her. He’d noticed bandages on her wrists, and she’d told him about an aborted suicide attempt at a nearby bridge. Although David assumed she was just going through a phase, when he received an anonymous e-mail from someone who wanted to tell him about some shady doings between a local politician and a for-profit prison operator, he figured he’d take her along when he went to the meet, even if only to keep an eye on her. The next day, after a scare at the amusement park when a bearded stranger briefly made off with Ethan, she was gone, disappearing somewhere between the main gate and the family car, to which she’d returned to fetch a forgotten backpack. Things start looking bad for David when the police notice that David’s credit card had only been charged for two amusement-park tickets—one adult and one child—and when his wife is nowhere to be seen on the park’s security cameras. When police realize that no one has seen her since the two of them drove to a service station in a wooded area to meet his source, David becomes the prime suspect in a murder investigation. David, meanwhile, does a little digging into his wife’s past, and begins to suspect he never really knew her at all. Barclay’s previous thrillers, especially Fear the Worst (2009), worked by being believable enough to force the reader to see things through the eyes of his Everyman protagonists, who suddenly find themselves thrust into a world of crime, lies and suspicion. But here, with a few exceptions, the characters are far too wooden to clinch the deal, and the writing is bland at best, occasionally dipping into the downright bad.
3) "Gorky Park" by Martin Cruz Smith
If this essentially conventional suspense plot--police procedural with government coverups--were set in Washington, it would add up to well-written, unremarkable entertainment. But Smith (Nightwing) places his thriller in Moscow; and though one isn't always fully convinced of his political authenticity or his characters' genuine Russian-ness, there's enough irreverent, uncliched local Soviet color here--more than in any recent US popular fiction--to lift the proceedings to a near-compelling level. Three bodies have been found under frozen snow in Moscow's congenial Gorky Park: the faces have been carved away, the fingertips removed, the teeth shattered; there are no clues to their identity except a foreign (US?) tooth filling, the ice-skates on the dead feet, and dust suggesting a connection to the forged-ikon black-market. So Chief Homicide Investigator Arkady Renko--a war hero's son and a bad Party member (his unfaithful wife is a good Party member)--zeroes in on Moscow's foreign visitors, on the black-market, on movie-company employee Irina (owner of one of the pairs of skates). And his hunches almost immediately fix on sleek US fur-importer John Osborne--hunches confirmed by the subsequent murder of a black-marketeer witness. But why would rich Osborne kill for some semi-valuable ikons? And though two of the victims seem to have been Siberian, what of the American victim--whose brother (a N.Y. cop who lavishes scorn on Arkady's methods) is sleuthing around on his own? And why is the KGB--or Arkady's boss--obstructing the investigation? (A KGB man steals the reconstructed head of one of the victims.) The answer is sable, Russia's choicest monopoly; but Arkady's shrewd detection merely lands him in KGB custody. And in the States-side finale (a Staten Island shootout) he and new-love Irina become pawns as Russia tries to get back its precious animals from wily thief Osborne. . . . An only-serviceable plot, rather too talkily slow-paced; and the Arkady/Irina romance is shrill (political) and unconvincing. But the textures are the point here--dour humor, the everydayness of paranoia, caviar in the steambath (for some), dirty snow and red tape--and they're richly specific enough to make this a special sort of suspense treat: bitter-cold and vodka-sharp.
4) "Shadow Man" by Cody McFadyen
“Jack Jr.,” a serial killer modeling himself after Jack the Ripper, stalks the Internet for victims.
Mean sites on the Internet have become the mean streets of contemporary thrillers, as this debut makes clear. Although plenty of nasty action plays out in San Francsico and L.A., the more compelling parts of McFadyen’s pursuit center on the net, where capture and survival become a matter of tracking website sign-on names, IPs (Internet protocol numbers) and user IDs. Faced with taking on a new case, FBI agent Smoky Barrett feels shaky. She’s Annie Oakley with a pistol and her early work at the Bureau was stellar. Then she killed a man who had just murdered her husband and daughter, but not before the culprit raped Smoky and scarred her face and body. Smoky realizes she must return to work when high-school friend Annie King is brutally murdered. The agent is shocked to learn that Annie had been the star performer on an Internet sex site. The killer, Smoky discovers, envisions himself as Jack Jr., a latter day Jack the Ripper determined to kill the whores working the net. Scrutinizing a video the killer made of the murder, Smoky and staff discern two killers at work and they wonder if the stalker, like a deadly computer virus, is recruiting other killers from sexually demented surfers salivating over porn websites. Even more disconcerting are Jack Jr.’s e-mails to Smoky and staff. He taunts them by revealing he knows intimate details of their lives and their homes. Emboldened, he suggests he’s coming after Smoky. The final race through streets and cyberspace heads to a confrontation that’s violent and suspenseful, and a revelation that’s rather startling—at least to readers who have never seen a 1980s Brian De Palma movie.
Brisk and fascinating.
5) "Before I Go To Sleep" by S.J. Watson
Based upon a deceptively simple premise, Watson’s debut novel unwinds as a story that is both complicated and compellingly hypnotic.
Every single morning of Christine’s life is exactly the same as every other morning: She awakens next to a total stranger in a room she does not recognize, surrounded by objects she has never before seen. Christine remembers nothing of the day before and not much of the life she lived prior to these mornings. She remembers being a lithe 20-something, but awakens day after day in the body of a woman who is nearly 50, with sagging breasts and wrinkles. Most disturbing, though, is the older man she does not recognize beside her in bed. The man, who patiently explains that he is her husband, Ben, tells her how she has come to this terrible place. Christine, he says, was struck by an automobile and injured. Now she suffers from a type of amnesia that once she sleeps for the night wipes the slate from the previous day clean. When she awakens, she cannot recall her life or the people in it. Ben anticipates her questions, though, and has placed photos of himself and Christine around the bathroom mirror so that when she awakens in a panic, with a body and face that she cannot recognize, she will find the photos and begin once again to adjust to a world where she remembers nothing. But Christine is seeing a doctor behind Ben’s back. His name is Dr. Nash, and he encourages her to keep a journal. It is through this journal that she begins to pick up the pieces of her life and who she was before she was injured. Watson writes in the first person, from the perspective of a woman, and the voice is surprisingly spot-on. The angst is unimaginable but palpable in this suspenseful story of a woman who can take nothing for granted.
Watson’s pitch-perfect writing propels the story to a frenzied climax that will haunt readers long after they’ve closed the cover on this remarkable book.
6) "No Time For Goodbye" by Linwood Barclay
What kind of family would disappear in the middle of the night, abandoning a 14-year-old girl forever?
Canadian newspaper columnist Barclay (Stone Rain, 2007, etc.) tries his hand at bourgeois terror, getting it largely right in a dark domestic thriller. Cynthia Bigge was going off the tracks a little in her 14th year. Bad mouth, hoodlum boyfriend, incomplete homework, sullen face, the usual intense adolescent mess—but nothing so bad that her mom and dad and brother, all of whom loved her despite her crummy behavior, would want to walk out on her forever. Yet that seems to have been the case for Cynthia, who woke up hungover in an empty house after having been yanked out of her date’s car by an angry dad. Two decades later, married to nice high-school English teacher Terry Archer, now the mother of bright little Grace, Cynthia has never really gotten over the disappearance. Raised by her gruff but loving aunt Tess, Cynthia can’t bear for Grace to be out of her sight. Narrator Terry tries his best to cope with Cynthia’s tensions, but the couple’s appearance on a cold-case TV show seems to push Cynthia over the edge. Instead of the expected flood of helpful clues from a fascinated nation, there are only a few fruitless leads. Worse for the family, Cynthia keeps seeing things like a mysterious recurring automobile and a stranger who looks like her brother, if he were still alive. Is she going ’round the bend? Friends and family seem to think so, but Barclay weaves in the spooky thoughts and comments of someone who clearly has it in not just for Cynthia, but for anything and anyone having to do with her. It all comes back to that disastrous night and to the odd, unclear occupation of Cynthia’s father, a job that kept him on the road far too much.
A little talky, but scary enough to keep the pages turning.
7) "Monkeewrench" by P.J. Tracy
Where will all those violent computer games end? With a copycat series of real-life homicides, in a preposterous, entertaining nailbiter that marks a pseudonymous mother-and-daughter team’s first effort.
Not content with the millions they’ve already made, the five misfits who comprise Monkeewrench Software Development have outdone themselves in their Serial Killer Detective (SKUD) game, whose 20 levels provide 20 different crime scenes. When they put the software online, however, the response is more enthusiastic than they’d expected. Among the 500-odd users who’ve signed on to test-drive the game, one of them has begun to re-create the crimes in loving detail. A seminary student shot to death as he jogs along the river, a novice hooker posed atop a stone angel, a sensation-seeking marketing rep whose discovery in an indelicate position interrupts a society wedding reception aboard a paddlewheel steamer—they’re all taken chapter and verse from SKUD. As Minneapolis Detective Leo Magozzi sorts through leads and tussles with Grace MacBride and her cop-hating, gun-toting Monkeewrench confrères, Sheriff Michael Halloran, miles from everywhere in Kingsford County, Wisconsin, is confronted with the shootings of a homophobic old couple in their parish church and the fatal booby-trap in the house they won’t be returning to. The root of all this evil is pretty clearly a hermaphrodite killer and a bloodbath at the University of Georgia ten years ago, but will Magozzi and Halloran put the pieces together, or even join forces with each other, in time to prevent the murder the fourth level prescribes for the Mall of America? And as the noose tightens around Monkeewrench, which of the five partners—flamboyant clotheshorse Annie Belinsky, techno-weenie Roadrunner, wine and hog connoisseur Harley Davidson, straitlaced Mitchell Cross, or paranoid Grace herself—will hold the key to the puzzle?
Late-night alert: Don’t settle down with this wacky, supercharged maiden voyage at your bedside till you’ve cleared your schedule for the following morning.
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