In this striking thriller, Carson (Lost Man’s Lane)—a pseudonym for crime novelist Michael Koryta—nimbly entwines a contemporary coming-of-age story with a tale of Cold War paranoia. Charlie Goodwin, 17 and half-orphaned, has relocated from Brooklyn, N.Y., to Ash Point, Maine, so her father can chase his dream of opening a brewery. There’s not much to the town, save for the long-abandoned naval air station and the wreckage of the B-52 bomber Charlie’s grandfather crashed into the side of a mountain in 1962. One morning, from the cockpit of that wreck, Charlie hears her dead mother’s voice over the radio, warning her not to fly that day, though she had no plans to do so. Across the country, hundreds of pilots receive similar messages from their own mothers, living and dead. The calls come from an AI program designed to clear the skies, triggered when a satellite detects the reappearance of a B-52 that mysteriously vanished mid-flight on a mission to drop a hydrogen bomb on Cuba to bring an end to the Cuban Missile Crisis. As Charlie’s story unfolds over a single tense afternoon, flashbacks chronicle Dr. Martin “Marty” Hazleton’s efforts to find a method to shield airplanes from nuclear fallout. With copious cliffhangers, an original premise, and a resonant emotional center, this builds on Carson’s previous success. It’s a winner. Agent: Richard Pine, InkWell Management. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 06/13/2025 | Details & Permalink

Thorogood’s delightful fourth cozy featuring 79-year-old crossword puzzle creator and amateur sleuth Judith Potts (after The Queen of Poisons) sees her investigating the murder of a local actor. When Verity Beresford’s husband, Oliver, fails to return home after attending an exclusive boat party for the board members of the Marlow Amateur Dramatic Society, Verity marches over to Judith’s home to ask for her help. Judith speaks with other party guests, none of whom saw Oliver leave the boat. A few days later, Oliver’s body is found on a riverbank with two bullet holes in his torso. With suicide and accident off the table, Judith swings into action with the help of her exuberant DJ friend, Suzie Harris, and the local vicar’s wife, Becks Starling. Together, the group finds that, though Oliver had plenty of petty rivals within Marlow’s dramatic society, this case might stretch decades into the past. Thorogood serves up everything cozy fans want: colorful characters, snappy dialogue, and a fair-play mystery with genuinely surprising plot twists. This will thrill series fans and new readers alike. Agent: Ginger Clark, Ginger Clark Literary. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 06/13/2025 | Details & Permalink

Richter follows The Divide with a razor-edged thriller set amid the rarefied world of opera performers. Kit Margolis has been cast as space adventurer Barbarella in a new production by experimental Manhattan opera company Brio. From the moment Kit meets her understudy, Yolanda Archambeau, she senses trouble. Brio’s director obviously prefers Yolanda’s electric-if-sloppy performance over Kit’s sealed-off, note-perfect take on the cult-film heroine, and Yolanda, having slept and blackmailed her way into the understudy position, makes no secret of her intention to supplant Kit before the show opens. As the pair’s All About Eve antics heat up, they settle into an unsteady frenemy dynamic, until Yolanda is murdered while Kit is asleep in the same room, possibly under the influence of sedatives administered by Yolanda herself. A frightened Kit digs into Yolanda’s past, and soon learns that she was living under an assumed name and has plenty of enemies who may want her dead—and who might come after Kit next. The plot starts slowly, but once things kick into gear, Richter delivers soapy backstage dynamics and gasp-worthy twists. It’s a satisfying nail-biter. Agent: Kerry Sparks, Levine Greenberg Rostan. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 06/13/2025 | Details & Permalink

At the outset of Morey’s slow-burn debut, former chef Laelia Wylde leaves the U.K. with her children and boyfriend, Aidrian “Aid” Lynch, to visit her retired botanist father, Ellis, in Belize. On Ellis’s birthday, Laelia introduces him to Aid, and senses immediate tension between the two men. After the gathering, Ellis whispers something to her, but her tinnitus prevents her from understanding it. The same night, Ellis suffers a stroke and falls into a coma, prompting Laelia to move her family into his jungle home while he’s hospitalized. As Laelia and her children grow enchanted by life in the jungle, Aid becomes increasingly jealous and volatile. Things take a dark turn when Laelia, who worries that her tinnitus is distorting her grasp on reality, thinks she hears gunshots in the middle. Along the way, Morey weaves in chapters exploring Ellis’s past, tracing his journey to Belize and his uncovering of dangerous scientific secrets. Though the pace can drag, Morey’s descriptions of the jungle are lush and immersive, and she delivers a chillingly effective payoff. This shows real promise. Agent: Madeleine Milburn, Madeleine Milburn Literary. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 06/13/2025 | Details & Permalink

Former Wall Street analyst Gowani parlays his financial experience into a solid debut thriller. After Pakistani hedge fund manager Ali “Al” Jafar loses $300 million for Prism Capital in one day, his boss gives him a new fund with $300 million in it and challenges him to double it in three months—or become the fall guy for the government’s ongoing insider trading investigation. With his boss’s obnoxiously racist son doing everything he can to interfere, Al calls a phone number that an old lawyer friend claims will help him reach a man who facilitates connections for the desperate. The resulting introductions propel Al to incredible success, but also draw him into a complex world of blackmail and misplaced trust from which escape may be impossible. Though Gowani’s rendering of the racist, sexist world of finance occasionally feels like it’s perpetuating the stereotypes he attempts to skewer, the plot is tense without straining plausibility too far, and Al comes off as an intelligent antihero whom the reader will (somewhat reluctantly) want to see triumph over those manipulating him. It’s an encouraging first outing. Agent: Christopher Schelling, Selectric Artists. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 06/13/2025 | Details & Permalink

Fierce FBI rookie Rae Johnson explores the criminal underbelly of college football in this captivating thriller from Edgar winner and former collegiate quarterback Cranor (Broiler). Set during the 2013–2014 season, the novel finds Rae, daughter of University of Arkansas coach Chuck Johnson, heading onto familiar turf for her first case. She arrives in Compson, Miss., to join burned-out agent Frank Ranchino on a stalled undercover probe of potential fraud in the University of Central Mississippi’s football program. Then star quarterback Matt Talley plunges to his death from the roof of a bar, and the game changes—at least in Rae’s mind. Disobeying her pension-minded partner’s orders to stay in her lane, Rae goes rogue and poses as a sports journalist to pursue her own, increasingly high stakes investigation into the quarterback’s death. Though Cranor calls perhaps a few too many audibles as the plot twists escalate in the novel’s final third, his quirky characters, playful humor, and insider’s view of the college football landscape ensure that this makes it all way to the end zone. Readers will hope to hear more from Rae soon. Agent: Josh Getzler, HG Literary. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 06/13/2025 | Details & Permalink

The overstuffed debut thriller from Jang nods to the work of Patricia Highsmith. A woman named Jae-Young boards a train bound for Seoul to escape her troubles—chiefly the dead body of her abusive boyfriend, Hyun-Wook, which is lying on the floor of her apartment. Soon after the train departs, a young woman named Hyojin rushes into Jae-Young’s compartment with a baby in her arms. The two converse, and Hyojin confides that she is taking her son for their first visit to the home of his wealthy grandfather, Hyojin’s father-in-law. Jae-Young then steps away for a few minutes; when she returns, Hyojin is gone, but her baby remains, along with a note asking Jae-Young to deliver the child to his grandfather. When Jae-Young arrives at the old man’s mansion, everyone assumes she’s Hyojin, and she seizes the opportunity to slip into a new identity. Soon, however, she finds that her escape was too good to be true, with Hyojin’s secrets tied more closely to Jae-Young’s than she could’ve imagined. Jang smothers her rich (if familiar) premise under an avalanche of far-fetched twists and cardboard characters. Readers will be baffled. Agent: Barbara J. Zitwer, Barbara J. Zitwer Agency. (July)

Reviewed on 06/06/2025 | Details & Permalink

Goodwin debuts with a sleek political thriller that imagines the long-term consequences of legislative gridlock. In 2044 America, frustration about the impotence of the Democratic and Republican parties has led to the rapid growth of the SoMAD movement (“Somebody Make A Decision”). When a SoMAD rally in Washington, D.C., turns violent, one of the movement’s activists, law student Max Peller, ends up in a coma. His father, tech CEO Ethan Bessette, persuades Max’s mentor, former prosecutor Jack Sanborn, to run for president. Bessette’s offer to donate billions to Sanborn’s campaign convinces him to get in the race, but Sanborn faces formidable opposition from Clay Overton, the Republican Speaker of the House, who’s dreamed of winning the Oval Office for decades. Meanwhile, Sanborn’s sudden emergence as a public figure makes him the target for an aggrieved man who believes he botched an old case involving a teenage victim. Goodwin pulls strong suspense out of both the impending election and the question of whether Sanborn’s legal past will catch up with him, and he dodges a heap of near-future clichés with levelheaded worldbuilding. Admirers of Andrew Yang and Stephen Marche’s The Last Election will be entertained. (Self-published)

Reviewed on 06/06/2025 | Details & Permalink

At the outset of Delvey’s ho-hum second thriller featuring Eve Wren (after The Seven), the British prosecutor is being harangued by true crime buff Frank Tooley, who hopes she’ll look into a case from her days as a defense attorney. Frank maintains that Eve’s former client, Stephen Sheridan, was wrongly convicted in 2018 for falsely imprisoning a 10-year-old girl, and implores Eve to reinvestigate. Meanwhile, Eve looks into the death of a woman named Becca Farrow, who drowned in the Thames after falling from Southwark Bridge. Becca’s godmother is Eve’s supervisor, and she insists the death couldn’t have been suicide. Eve soon discovers a pattern of women falling off bridges across London, with evidence pointing toward a troubled young man named Bradley Aspen, who’s shielded by diplomatic immunity as the son of a U.S. Embassy official. Delvey kicks things off with an effective opening tease that features Eve nearly falling to her death from Waterloo Bridge, but contrived coincidences and a clumsy interweaving of the main plot threads dull the suspense. It’s a disappointment. Agent: Marilia Savvides, Plot Agency. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 06/06/2025 | Details & Permalink

Taylor’s slow-building second mystery featuring taciturn detective Franklin Warren of the Vermont State Police (after Agony Hill) paints an evocative portrait of the mid-1960s, complete with arguments about the war in Vietnam and the ambient buzz of nuclear paranoia. Warren is called to the Ridge Club, an exclusive hunting lodge, where former ambassador to West Germany William Moulton has been found dead. Despite circumstantial evidence that he may have died in a hunting accident and implications from fellow guests that it was suicide, Warren soon comes to believe Moulton was murdered. An intense snowstorm then knocks out phone lines and strands Warren and his colleague, Walter Goodrich, at the lodge with their suspects. Meanwhile, Warren’s best friend, Alice Farnham Bellows—an elderly widow and former spy—is tending to a neighbor and preparing a dinner party when her old handler comes knocking, prompting her to wonder if he has information about Moulton’s death. Given the amount of ground the narrative covers, Taylor’s pacing can be erratic, but she makes up for it with richly drawn characters and an immersive New England setting. By the time Warren cracks the case, readers will be eager for future adventures. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 06/06/2025 | Details & Permalink