1) "The Stranger You Seek" by Amanda Kyle Williams
A suspenseful tale of a clever crime-solver who gets a little too close to the action.
Lt. Aaron Rauser needs help catching what seems to be a new serial killer in his Atlanta stomping ground. He knows that the woman for the job is his old friend and crime-solving compatriot Keye Street. Keye’s not the kind of woman you mess around with, and while the folks on the force don’t like that she’s freelancing in their department, there’s not much they can do about it. Keye was on track to be a well-respected FBI profiler before an inconvenient addiction to booze got in the way. Now that she’s back on her feet, this tough and whip-smart investigator has opened her own small-time business. Although chasing bail jumpers keeps Keye and her hacker sidekick Neil in modest money, hunting down the deranged psychopath the Atlanta papers have dubbed the Wishbone Killer is just Keye’s piece of pie. The trouble is that the closer Keye seems to get to Wishbone, the more the killer seems to know about her: her thoughts, her feelings and even a few things she’s barely admitted to herself. As the action shifts from seemingly random events to targeted, graphic and brutal acts of violence, Keye is thrust from the role of hunter to hunted.
Williams (Club Twelve, 1994, etc.) creates a frightening and occasionally witty novel, perfect for those who can sleep with one eye open. Think Mary Higgins Clark with an edge.
2) "Case Histories" by Kate Atkinson
After two self-indulgent detours, Atkinson proves that her Whitbread Award–winning debut, Behind the Scenes at the Museum (1996), was no fluke with a novel about three interconnected mysteries.
They seem totally unrelated at first to private detective Jackson Brodie, hired by separate individuals in Cambridge, England, to investigate long-dormant cases. Three-year-old Olivia Land disappeared from a tent in her family’s backyard in 1970; 34 years later, her sisters Amelia and Julia discover Olivia’s stuffed toy in their recently deceased father’s study and want Jackson to find out what he had to do with the disappearance. Theo Wyre’s beloved 18-year-old daughter Laura was murdered by a knife-wielding lunatic in 1994, and he too hires Jackson to crack this unsolved murder. Michelle was also 18 when she went to jail in 1979 for killing her husband with an ax while their infant daughter wailed in the playpen; she vanished after serving her time, but Shirley Morrison asks Jackson to find, not her sister Michelle, but the niece she promised to raise, then was forced to hand over to grandparents. The detective, whose bitter ex-wife uses Jackson’s profound love for their eight-year-old daughter to torture him, finds all these stories of dead and/or missing girls extremely unsettling; we learn toward the end why the subject of young women in peril is particularly painful for him. Atkinson has always been a gripping storyteller, and her complicated narrative crackles with the earthy humor, vibrant characterizations, and shrewd social observations that enlivened her first novel but were largely swamped by postmodern game-playing in Human Croquet (1997) and Emotionally Weird (2000). Here, she crafts a compulsive page-turner that looks deep into the heart of sadness, cruelty, and loss, yet ultimately grants her charming p.i. (and most of the other appealingly offbeat characters, including one killer) a chance at happiness and some measure of reconciliation with the past.
Wonderful fun and very moving: it’s a pleasure to see this talented writer back on form.
3) "Tripwire" by Lee Child
Book Three of Twenty--to see other titles check in County Cat
4) "The Killing Hour" by Lisa Gardner
A cunning serial killer plays devilish mind games with his would-be captors—and what else is new?
Not much. Well, he does have this penchant for pluralizing. That is, he grabs his young women in pairs. Why pairs? He uses corpse one for the planting of clues sufficient to allow law enforcement—if law enforcement is astute enough—to find corpse two alive. “Eco-Killer,” he’s been tabbed because in addition to his passion for gamesmanship, he seems to have an ongoing love-hate relationship with the environment. From Georgia, scene of the first killings, we shift to Virginia, where Special Agent Mac McCormack of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation has been on the case from the outset. He’s been directed to Virginia by a barrage of enigmatic phone calls from someone who claims to know how the serial killer’s sly and twisted mind works. In Quantico, a training ground for FBI agents as well as for US Marines, Mac meets fledgling feebie Kimberly Quincy, daughter of former agent Pierce Quincy, famous throughout the service for his legendary exploits as a profiler. When the Eco-Killer strikes again, Quincy and his p.i. partner Lorraine Conner, mainstays of the series, (The Next Accident, 2001, etc.), are called in to consult, but the case really belongs to the captivating Kimberly and hunkish Mac (with their bods for sex and brains for high-powered detecting). Convinced there’s a chance to save a life if they can manage to solve the killer’s puzzle in time, the two desperately seek clues from botanists, biologists, entomologists, and a variety of other analysts. Something from here, something from there, and at last they can make the guess that plunges them deep into Virginia’s Shenandoah National Park, where the game plays out to a fiery end.
Too much psychobabble, technobabble, and envirobabble, yet the appeal of the young sleuths (smart, funny, tough) almost saves the day.
Book Four of Six: The Perfect Husband, The Third Victim, The Next Accident, Gone and Say Goodbye
5) "No Second Chance" by Harlan Coben
Once again, Coben (Gone for Good, 2002, etc.) expertly tugs at a suburban citizen’s most ordinary fears until he finds a mind-boggling criminal conspiracy at the other end of the line.
Pediatric reconstructive surgeon Marc Seidman’s family life ends with two shots into his body and another into his wife Monica’s, leaving her as dead as Marc was supposed to be. When he awakens 12 days later, he learns that his baby girl Tara has disappeared from his home as well. There’s a ransom demand, and Monica’s wealthy, remote father is happy to pay the freight, but Marc ignores Edgar Portman’s wishes, tips off the police and the FBI, and loses the money, any hope of recovering Tara, and his crackhead sister Stacy, who dies of an overdose soon after the cops tie her to the abduction. Eighteen months later, though, the kidnappers give Marc the second chance they swore they wouldn’t: For another $2 million, they’ll return Tara, whose hair samples they’ve already sent to her grandfather. And now Marc has a new ally, his college girlfriend Rachel Mills, a former FBI agent who just happens to have turned up again. If you think Marc and Rachel will outfox the kidnappers this time around, you don’t know Coben, who’s looking way past the second abortive ransom drop to a racket that entangles a washed-up child TV star, the protector she met in the loony bin, an improbably successful adoption lawyer, and assorted Serbian extras. And just in case these malefactors aren’t enough, he casts suspicion on Dina Levinsky, the abused girl who used to live in Marc’s house; on Rachel (how did her husband get shot to death?); and even on Marc himself (why were he and Monica shot with two different weapons?).
Irresistibly overstuffed. Coben has blossomed into the male Mary Higgins Clark.
6) "Still Missing" by Chevy Stevens
Stevens’s blistering debut follows a kidnap victim from her abduction to her escape—and the even more horrifying nightmare that follows.
One moment, Vancouver Island realtor Annie O’Sullivan is taking one last client, a quiet, well-spoken man with a nice smile, through the property where she’s holding an open house; the next moment, she’s being marched out to a van at gunpoint, unaware that it’s the last time for months that she’ll see the sky or breathe the open air. The man who’s taken her calls himself David; she calls him The Freak. And her ordeal over the next year, described in unsparing detail in a series of lacerating sessions with her psychiatrist, indicates that her name is a lot more accurate than his. Annie is fondled, beaten, raped and starved by a man whose troubled background has evidently convinced him that she wants him to treat her with exactly this combination of brutality and solicitude. Worse still, she internalizes his obsessive rules (meals and bathroom breaks on a strict schedule, ritual baths and sex, complete control of every word she speaks and her tone of voice) so completely that she remains terrified of breaking them. Months after her miraculous return to the world she wondered if she’d ever see again, she’s still cowering every night in her closet, unable to hold her own in anything like a normal conversation with her flirtatious, irresponsible mother, her best friend Christina, her restaurateur boyfriend Luke, or any of the dozens of interviewers who stalk her, “just sadists with a bigger paycheck” than The Freak. Worst of all is the dawning realization, fostered by sympathetic, no-nonsense Staff Sgt. Gary Kincade, that The Freak had at least one accomplice who helped him select his victim—perhaps an accomplice who had a particular reason to wish Annie ill.
A grueling, gripping demonstration of melodrama’s darker side. As Annie tells the cops who insist that everything’s OK because she’s safe: “I was never going to be okay, or safe.”
7) "Kisscut" by Karin Slaughter
If novels were sold with parental advisories, Dr. Sara Linton’s second case (after Blindsighted, 2001) would be plastered with every warning notice they make. The opening sequence, in which Sara’s ex, Grant County police chief Jeffrey Tolliver, is forced to shoot Jenny Weaver, a troubled teenager who’s apparently just tried to flush a newborn baby down a skating-rink toilet when Jenny draws down on Mark Patterson and begs the chief to shoot first, would get an R for violence and adult themes. The autopsies on Jenny and the baby offer horrifying reasons why Sara can be sure Jenny wasn’t the mother and hadn’t been sexually active for months. The interviews with Jenny’s trash-talking classmates are starkly depressing. And the questions revolving around the ensuing investigation—who were the baby’s parents, and why was Jenny so determined either to kill Mark or die herself?—only broaden into still more monstrous revelations, beginning with a web of child abusers and getting ever darker until they overflow the whodunit’s traditional promise of closure. Readers prepared to take the plunge will be rewarded with the uncommon intensity Slaughter brings to everything from action to dialogue and her peculiarly literary sense of humor (in addition to characters named Eddie Linton and Hare Earnshaw, she dubs a pedophile Arthur Prynne).
It’s not easy to transcend a model like Patricia Cornwell, but Slaughter does so in a thriller whose breakneck plotting and not-for-the-squeamish forensics provide grim manifestations of a deeper evil her mystery trumpets without ever quite containing.
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