Thrilling books

Lisa Gardner releases her first stand-alone thriller in years, and it stand outs as a masterpiece of postmodern noir in the vein of Dennis Lehane.

Gardner is also at home in Lehane’s backyard of the working-class Boston suburbs, Mattapan in this case. The book introduces us to Frankie Elkin, a woman with more than her share of skeletons in the closet, who’s dedicated to finding lost souls — literally in the form of often long-missing persons. In this case, it’s a high school student who’s been missing for a year. Frankie peels back the dark layers to reveal the terrifying truth buried in this particularly insular community.

“Before She Disappeared” is a riveting stunner where the rare appearance of the sun shines down on what is certain to be one of the best thrillers of 2021.

Gregg Hurwitz continues his Orphan X series with the most personal entry so far.

Assassin-turned-avenger Evan Smoak meets his (supposed) birth mother who gave him up for adoption, setting the stage for a secret government agency to turn him into their deadly play toy. That meeting sets Smoak on the protective trail of the downtrodden Andrew Duran, who had the additional misfortune of seeing something he wasn’t supposed to. And that places Smoak in the crosshairs of a deadly assassin team who’d like nothing better than to claim him as their trophy.

Six books in, this series shows no sign of tiring, and neither does Hurwitz whose manic writing energy is keenly on display. He’s simply the best all-out action writer in the business, to which he adds a shrewd sense of character.

Frank Figliuzzi has lived the life of a typical crime-thriller hero, in this case rising to the level of head of counterintelligence for the FBI. He chronicles his exploits in “The FBI Way.”

Figliuzzi knows what makes real-life villains tick, and his anecdote-rich tale of climbing the Bureau’s ranks, and the bad guys he took down along the way, is told with fiction-like levels of suspense and intrigue. It’s almost like reading something by Thomas Harris, thanks to his agent protagonists Clarice Starling and Will Graham. In this book, though, the monsters that go bump in the night are real, and it’s left to men like Figliuzzi to keep us safe from them.

“The FBI Way” is an achievement in narrative nonfiction, a thrilling non-thriller.

Troubled war vet Sam Eaton, just back from serving in Afghanistan, is a murder suspect simply for agreeing to help a friend. Good thing LAPD homicide detective Margaret Nolan is on the job. She knows all too well the price those who serve overseas must often pay.

Nolan refuses to take things at face value, a good thing, since little is as it appears to be, something that becomes abundantly clear as she assembles this jigsaw puzzle of a plot.

Tracy writes like a female Raymond Chandler, owning the modern streets of Los Angeles in this noir-steeped tale. At its heart, though, “Deep Into the Dark” features the perfect blend of social commentary and narrative tension, making it a read as entertaining as it is enlightening.

The latest in the terrific K-9 Alaska series, is a perfect amalgam of emotion and action.

Raised by parents who turned out to be kidnappers, Alanna Morgan attempts to erase the scars left on her psyche by helping others in the company of her St. Bernard therapy dog. Good thing he’s by her side when the woman who called herself Alanna’s mother breaks out of prison, leading to a reunion that brings Alanna’s life full circle. And that’s before the rugged and treacherous Alaskan wilderness becomes a character in its own right.

“Alaska Mountain Rescue” packs a punch on every page but features an emotional wallop that makes it truly stand out.

This is not a thriller per se. But Jamison Hill’s pulse-pounding narrative of his struggle to recover from a devastating car crash, which somehow leaves him with an even more devastating disease called myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome, feels like a thriller.

He ends up bedridden, unable to feed himself or perform even the simplest of everyday tasks. A prisoner in many respects, but one who refuses to accept his fate and fights to escape. Hill’s book chronicles those efforts in a deliberate, painstaking and often agonizing fashion, taking us along for a hellish ride down a road we can only hope we’ll never have to travel ourselves.

Hill chronicles his heroic recovery with the skill and aplomb of a penner of page-turners, leading to a thrilling and inspiring tale par excellence.