Then the twists start coming.Īnthony Horowitz’s brand new “A Line to Kill” is prime Horowitz - that is, a mystery wrapped in a riddle. No screens, no Internet - and almost no women. They marry, he sweeps her off to a honeymoon at what appears to be a billionaire tech-dude retreat off the coast of Maine.

Abigail, whose parents run a theater company in Western Massachusetts, moves to New York City and meets a charmer, Bruce, who claims he’s rich enough to pay off her student loans. The Somerville author’s latest, “Every Vow You Break,” is all psychological thriller. I loved Peter Swanson’s Boston-set “Eight Perfect Murders,” which was more of a cozy mystery. “The Long Call” was solid, and starting Oct. I also like her Detective Matthew Venn series - Venn and his husband live in a remote coastal area.

Start with award-winning “Raven Black,” and read them in order.

Her Shetland series, set on the islands off the coast of Scotland and featuring quiet-man Detective Jimmy Perez, are, hands-down, her best, and are now a BBC series. Having devoured all of Tana French’s mysteries, I set out to find an author with the same rainy, craggy, remote European-mystery flavor. The sequel, “ Sleep Well, My Lady,” came out in January and is due out in paperback in December. Quartey, who is Ghanaian-American, seems to have a great series potential on his hands. Her first case takes her down the darkest parts of the Internet. Twenty-something Emma Djan wanted to follow in her late father’s footsteps as a police officer - but ends up with a private detective agency. Last year’s “The Missing American,” by Kwei Quartey, is a much-deserved Edgar nominee, set in Accra, Ghana. That’s when the revenge thriller picks up speed. Ming falls for the daughter of a railroad magnate, they elope - but henchmen kidnap the bride and conscript Ming into railroad service. Lin, who was born in Beijing, tells the tale of Ming Tsu, son of Chinese immigrants, raised and trained by the head of a California crime syndicate. This one was just longlisted for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. There’s bit of Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy flavor in Tom Lin’s “The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu,” a western gothic revenge tale ripe for a Coen brothers adaptation. In “The River” - his 2019 National Bestseller and Edgar Award nominee - two outdoors-loving college buddies find an unconscious woman on an isolated canoe trip in Northern Canada she may or may not be hunted by a psychopath, and there are two gun nuts on the loose, all while a forest fire is approaching. All his books are solid, but these two in particular are master classes in the unsettling. Because I love both into-the-wild survival tales and thrillers, two of my current favorites are Peter Heller’s “The River,” now in paperback, and his newest release, “The Guide.” Heller writes like a veteran outdoorsman influenced by Cormac McCarthy and Jon Krakauer.

Agency gothic bold