So far, this is shaping up to be an amazing year for fans of mystery and thriller books. There have simply never so many high-quality choices on the market, and narrowing the list down from the hundreds of books our team has read this year to just a handful is daunting. Our 2019 list of […]
The Bottom Line: A must-read for spy thriller and political thriller fans. Given the growing distrust between the U.S. and Russia in the real world, it was only a matter of time before the rebirth of the espionage thriller. William Hunter’s Fallout isn’t the first in the new wave of Russian spy thrillers, but it’s […]
The Bottom Line: One word sums up Koontz’s third Jane Hawk novel: spectacular. Are you prone to conspiracy theories? Do you fear technology? If so, you may want to skip Dean Koontz’s latest outing, which demonstrates both his passion for emerging technology and his ability to project oddly believable worst-case scenarios onto it. A group […]
The Bottom Line: Solving Cadence Moore is the quintessential mystery for the podcast era. Highly recommended. In the age of hit true crime podcasts like Serial, Criminal and My Favorite Murder, debut novelist Gregory Sterner has delivered the first work of fiction to effectively capture the contemporary media zeitgeist. Prepare to be hooked on page […]
The Bottom Line: One of the year’s best thrillers. Part psychological suspense, part contemporary noir, Johnny Manic is wonderfully unreliable. Tom Gantry, a.k.a. Johnny Manis, a.k.a. Johnny Manic, is having an identity crisis of epidemic proportions. As Tom tells it, the gregarious, effortlessly cool Johnny Manis became legendary in the tech world for making a […]
The Bottom Line: A thriller about greed, gluttony and murder that is destined for the big screen. The promise of inheritance has divided families since the beginning of time, and from time to time has ended in murder. But novelist Jill Hand’s White Oaks has introduced an ingenious new twist on the time-old tale, as […]
The Bottom Line: Lush and evocative. The perfect introduction to Sibel Hodge, one of the decade’s most dynamic literary talents. Set in the fictional West African country of Narumbe (you thought I was going to say Wakanda, didn’t you?), author Sibel Hodge delivers a taut thriller that could be a bonafide blockbuster. While Hodge commits the […]
The Bottom Line: A blend of non-fiction and fiction that works on many levels. Alice Sandoval’s The New Holy Warriors adds a potent new layer to the canon of post-9/11 political thriller literature. The primary story begins on September 13, 2001, as Dr. Rodrigo Bravo and his wife Sally, both Doctors Without Borders volunteers vanish […]
The Bottom Line: A wonderfully claustrophobic murder mystery with a razor-sharp amateur sleuth. As long as there have been artists, there have been long-suffering personal assistants. But author Laura Stewart Schmidt, author of the deftly-written Until Proven Innocent, manages to deliver plenty of surprises in Don’t Fear, My Darling. In 1987, twenty-two-year-old Louisa Berry is […]
The Bottom Line: Original, audacious and raw. A truly dark treat for fans of the serial killer genre. Russell Pisarek, the budding killer at the heart of The Bedwetter, is truly in a class of his own. Should Lee Allen Howard’s The Bedwetter be adapted for TV, the money line in the series trailer will surely be, […]
