Spooky season is far from over, and this month’s Thrill List proves it. From paranormal noirs and keen legal thrillers to neo-gothic tales and blood-curdling psychological masterpieces, these thrilling reads will keep you up through the long nights ahead — so be prepared.
Gone Before Goodbye by Reese Witherspoon and Harlan Coben
Movie star Reese Witherspoon and Harlan Coben, a star in his own right, have teamed up to write Gone Before Goodbye, a thriller that more than lives up its impossibly high expectations.
In large part, that’s because of a beautifully drawn, easily to relate to hero in former surgeon Maggie McCabe. “Former” is key since the heroic feats she performed as a battlefield trauma surgeon aren’t enough to keep her from losing her medical license after a string of tragedies and misjudgments. Desperate, Maggie makes a Faustian bargain to service the world’s weathiest, and most secretive, clients. What could go wrong, right? Plenty as it turns out, as Maggie finds herself set up and becomes a hunted fugitive, thanks to the evil undercurrents rippling around her.
Gone Before Goodbye bears all of Coben’s signature twists, turns and shocking surprises. He’s always been great at writing strong, desperate women, so it’s hard to see exactly where Witherspoon’s contribution comes in. But who cares? The mark of a great collaboration is not being able to tell who did what, and this is scintillating, spectacular tale centered on the corruption at the heart of society’s soul as well as Maggie’s, which she must overcome in order to survive.
Denied Access by Don Bentley
The late, great Vince Flynn’s seminal Mitch Rapp series remains in great hands with Don Bentley having taken the reins from Kyle Mills. And he really hits his stride with his third effort, Denied Access.
The action whisks us back to the early 1990’s featuring a younger and less jaded Rapp in his cold-blooded assassin days. The collapse of the Soviet Union forms the backdrop of this complex, multi-layered political thriller that casts Rapp as the CIA’s lone hope to restore order at its vital Moscow station. It’s a terribly desperate time when not being in the know can have terrible global ramifications, with the agency’s very existence hanging in the balance. Good thing even a younger Rapp is no stranger to balancing himself on the tightrope between the warring intelligence operations.
Denied Access is a thinking man’s thriller with more than enough bloodshed and pacing to please action aficionados as well. Bentley has struck the kind of balance Flynn himself had mastered in his last few efforts, and it’s wonderful to see the torch passed to a writer capable of keeping that fire going.
King Sorrow by Joe Hill
Joe Hill penned two of the scariest books I’ve ever read in Heart Shaped Box and NOS4A2. So, with Halloween season upon us, what better time to review his latest sensational stunner of a tale, King Sorrow.
Arthur Oakes is a college student who finds himself under the control of local thugs who pressure him into stealing rare books from the college library. In way over his head and with nowhere else to turn, Arthur and his friends use an ancient ritual to summon an even more ancient, murderous dragon to rid him of his problem. The good news is that King Sorrow ably does just that. The bad news is now Arthur is faced with a hungry dragon who’s got a taste for humans and needs his appetite satisfied on a regular basis, leaving him with a devil’s bargain he can’t escape.
The Faustian aspects of King Sorrow are brilliant in themselves, even before Hill layers in classic horror elements from the likes of H.P. Lovecraft, with a bit of Mary Shelley included for good measure. This is a big, broad story drawn over an exquisitely expansive canvas, its ambition exceeded only by its execution.
Cold War: A NecroTek Novel by Jonathan Maberry
There are no dragons lurking about in Jonathan Maberry’s bracing and blistering Cold War: A NecroTek Novel, but monsters of all sorts abound in this classic science fiction tale.
Like all great sci-fi novels, there is an awful lot going on, starting with an orbital space station that finds itself whisked way off course and straight into a battle with intergalactic horrors that are relentless in their quest for the destruction of anything in their path. If that wasn’t bad enough, scientists back on earth uncover a spaceship long buried in the Antarctic ice with an alien passenger inside somehow connected to the ongoing cosmic fight millions of miles away. That leaves it up to intrepid scientist Evie Cronin and her team to stop the destruction of civilization itself.
Maberry is simply the best science fiction writer working today, this generation’s Ray Bradbury. And, like Bradbury, he layers Cold War with probing questions on the nature of morality and mankind itself. This is a high-tech extravaganza, an extraordinary accomplishment in world-building and a wondrous achievement in seminal storytelling.
Where He Left Me by Nicole Baart
Nicole Baart has fashioned a splendidly creepy neo-gothic tale in Where He Left Me, a wondrous exercise in paranoia and isolation.
When Sadie Sheridan’s new husband disappears while on a trip involving his study and teaching of planetary science, she finds herself marooned at the aptly named Hemlock House, located in the remote mountains of Washington state’s North Cascades. Strangers appear, lurking outside. A storm springs up, further stranding her in the home’s dark halls that seem to have a mind of their own. Obviously, there is more afoot than meets the eye, even as Sadie finds herself as much a prisoner of her mind as the walls themselves.
Where He Left Me reads like a fog-drenched, modern-day version of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House or the Henry James classic The Turn of the Screw, minus the ghosts. A richly atmospheric, deeply unsettling journey that tests Sadie’s sanity at every turn as she begins to question the very notion of reality.
False Witness by Phillip Margolin
Outside of John Grisham and, occasionally, Scott Turow and Michael Connelly, it seems like nobody is writing great legal thrillers anymore with the exception of Phillip Margolin, whose latest False Witness checks every box.
It’s a classic comeback tale with attorney Karen Wyatt getting a second chance after exposing police corruption as a prosecutor waylaid her career and nearly got her sent to jail on a trumped-up charge. With her former antagonists gone from the scene, Karen is willing to let bygones be bygones until a murder case sends old skeletons rattling around in her closet. While she might get a chance to settle some old debts, she’ll have to risk squandering that second chance she so desperately wanted and deserved.
Reminiscent in all the right ways of Barry Reed’s The Verdict, Margolin’s latest hits on all cylinders, continuing his string of thoughtfully mesmerizing courtroom thrillers. The verdict is in, and False Witness is a winner.
The Kidnapping of Alice Ingold by Cate Holahan
No Thrill List column would be complete without a blood-curdling psychological thriller, and Cate Holahan has fashioned just that in The Kidnapping of Alice Ingold.
On the surface, we’re treated to what seems early on to be a kidnapping tale, when wealthy college coed Alice Ingold is snatched away. Her father, an Elon Musk-like tech genius, decides to use his mastery of artificial intelligence to get her back. But her kidnappers have other ideas, turning the abduction into a game where solving a riddle earns Alice’s freedom … or does it? The twists and turns abound until the shattering truth behind what’s really going on is revealed.
This is cutting-edge writing that brings the standard kidnapping story into the 21st century. Holahan is like a magician, directing our attention to her right hand when we should be looking at her left, establishing herself as a literary force to be reckoned with.
The Dead Hour by Thomas Grant Bruso
Thomas Grant Bruso’s latest devilishly entertaining The Dead Hour also appears on the surface to be a story about a missing girl, but it’s not exactly a spoiler to tell you it’s much more than that.
A missing girl, in this case, takes center stage when the private detective known only as Bradshaw is tasked with finding her. That’s before he’s visited by a ghost of a dead girl who may or may not be his quarry. What’s a self-respecting private investigator to do? In Bradshaw’s case, it’s to sort through the mystical morass, even as the line between the living and the dead becomes increasingly blurred. Which is nothing new for him, since early on he tells us, “I knew I could not hide. The dead would find me. The dead always did.”
Bruso has fashioned an exquisite effort in paranormal noir that brought to mind Paul Wilson’s terrific Repairman Jack series. But his staccato prose is more akin to Donald Westlake writing as Richard Stark in the brilliant Parker novels, minus the ghosts. The Dead Hour is a gem of a book from an author you’ll definitely be coming back to.
