This Changes Everything by Lisa Scottoline
Nobody, absolutely nobody, writes psychological thrillers as well as Lisa Scottoline. And she’s at her level best in This Changes Everything.
Julia Pritzker has built a great life for herself and her family in Tuscany, as a committed ex-pat with no plans to return stateside anytime soon. That is, until she’s struck by a psychic premonition that back home her best friend Courtney’s grandmother is about to be murdered. Before you can say “Stephen King,” it turns out she was right, and she rushes home to be by Courtney’s side through the difficult ordeal. Since neither woman has experience negotiating the minefield of a murder investigation, they bring in Scottoline stalwart, attorney Bennie Rosato, to lead a charge that unearths a conspiracy at the heart of the woman’s murder. Even as Julia continues to use her newfound psychic gifts to help sort through suspects, she realizes the real culprits have marked her as their next victim.
In This Changes Everything, Scottoline does everything exceedingly well. It’s a paranormal, conspiracy, small-town and psychological thriller all wrapped into one. Lesser hands would have likely fumbled such an ambitious undertaking, but Scottoline’s grasp is seasoned and sure, resulting in a riveting and relentless read that is not to be missed.
Full Bloom by Francesca Serritella
Speaking of the paranormal, Scottoline’s daughter Francesca Serritella fully emerges from her mother’s broad shadow with Full Bloom, culled from the be-careful-what-you-wish-for trope.
The Twilight Zone-like MacGuffin is a magical perfume an elderly neighbor mixes up for Iris Sunnegren, who feels left behind because she has no children. Sure enough, a single spray is all it takes to position Iris to claim anything she wants as her own. Clients, love, power and, of course, men. But as Rod Serling taught us long ago, when something seems too good to be true, it probably is. Unfortunately for Iris, the mysterious scent that awakens her spirit also stirs her demons in the form of repressed, nightmarish memories of her childhood.
With Full Bloom, Serritella has fashioned a sleek, sexy and scintillating psychological thriller of the highest order, kind of like Stephen King’s Needful Things with only a single item on the shelves or John Collier’s classic short story “The Chaser.” Reading entertainment of the highest order and a perfect summer beach read. Like mother, like daughter!
Desert Heist by Alex Dekker
Alex Dekker does a lot of things in Desert Heist, all of them well. Dekker, a Green Beret, at first glance seems the ideal candidate to turn out another solid, though cookie-cutter, military thriller. But his debut is far from that.
That’s because his doppelganger hero, Nate Wilde (gotta love that name!) is just as comfortable with an archaeological trowel and brush as he is with an M4 assault rifle. So when the time comes to leave the military, he turns to his true passion by seeking out the lost city of Ubar, aka the “Atlantis of the Sands.” When official channels turn a deaf ear to his plans, Wilde assembles a crack team of his old buddies and goes it alone, with no shortage of bad guys lining up to foil his efforts.
This is a high-concept thriller in the vein of James Rollins, Steve Berry and Brad Meltzer, a high bar Dekker meets at every level of Desert Heist. This is storytelling of the highest order, also evoking the likes of H. Rider Haggard (King Solomon’s Mines) and even the Doc Savage adventures I grew up on. In other words, an ambitious adventure tale that made me feel like a kid again.
Traitors by Robert B. McCaw
Thrillers don’t get any timelier than Robert B. McCaw’s Traitors, a non-stop romp that evokes comparisons with classic political nail-biters like The Manchurian Candidate and Seven Days in May.
How close Moscow has already come to running the White House is a question many of us have asked ourselves, while the answer in Traitors is a definitive yes. Robert Cooper, working out of the espionage division of the Department of Justice, is tasked with determining the veracity of a Russian agent’s claims that the plan is on the verge of succeeding under the auspices of Putin’s even more radical successor. The mechanizations of the complex plot evolve on the global stage, with Cooper racing to stop what may already be inevitable.
At its best, which is pretty much all the time, Traitors is the kind of book Robert Ludlum would be writing today. Its steely prose depicts a country, and a world, on the brink in a manner that creates its own reality, even as it reminds us of what we’re facing in reality outside the pages of this book. A thriller extraordinaire.
Killer Vibes by Jack Friday
Okay, count me a huge fan of Jack Friday ever since I read the first five pages of Killer Vibes, a mystery-thriller that’s the best debut of 2026 so far.
In large part, that’s due to the book’s hero, Peter Key, who should add “quasi” to his name since he’s a quasi-private eye, a quasi-babe AND -guy sexual magnet and quasi-rich guy after he inherits the estate of an uncle he barely knew. Even that won’t be enough to relieve the mountain of debt Peter’s inherited because he’s also a not-so-quasi mess when it comes to money. So when he moves into his late uncle’s once palatial home in Austin, Texas, it feels like a new beginning. Then he finds a bag of cash hidden among the man’s possessions, suggesting maybe his uncle didn’t die a natural death at all. What’s the harm in doing a little digging, right? Well, plenty when it runs Peter afoul of anything but quasi-bad guys who have no idea they’re up against someone quite capable of channeling his inner Jack Reacher.
Killer Vibes offers the perfect mix of light and dark, reminiscent in all the right ways of James W. Hall’s terrific and underrated Thorne series. Come to think of it, Peter also has a bit of Donald Westlake’s (writing as Richard Stark) fabulous Parker in the crass nobility that fuels his simmering machismo. Friday’s debut is as much fun as a book can possibly be, and the sequel can’t come fast enough.
The Last Time We Saw Her by Jaclyn Goldis
As a summer camp veteran, the premise behind Jaclyn Goldis’ The Last Time We Saw Her grabbed me immediately: A decade ago, ten teenage girls, all from the same camp, journeyed to the Azores for some hiking and exploring. Who knew that would lead to the search for a lost treasure and the disappearance of one of them?
In the present, a Dateline-like film crew is determined to get to the bottom of the mystery, which brings the girls and their counselors back together again at the literal scene of the crime. Instead of waiting to be mic’d up, they pick up the treasure hunt where they left off. Bad idea, it turns out, since it triggers all of their old adolescent baggage as adults. And when one of them is murdered, they realize they’ve picked up where they left off in more ways than one.
The Last Time We Saw Her is a tantalizingly twisty tale where the hardest thing to dig up is the truth. Goldis once again shines (after The Main Character) in what feels, at times, like a season of The White Lotus, just as dark and blood-soaked. Hopefully this is far from the last time we get to see another book of hers.
The Mediator by Robert Bailey
Robert Bailey offers a terrifying new twist to the traditional legal thriller with The Mediator, featuring a divorce settlement straight out of hell.
The book’s captivating lawyer hero, Max Ringo, is trying to get her life back in order, and maybe climb back up to the top of the ladder, in the title role after a devastating car accident left her addicted to painkillers and shattered her career. Then one of the partners in a nasty divorce kidnaps Max’s son and threatens to kill him if she doesn’t force the other party to settle. What’s a mother and mediator to do? Since this is a thriller, I don’t have to tell you there’s even more than that afoot and plenty of bodies fall before the shattering climax.
The Mediator is literally impossible to put down, a legal thriller par excellence that leaves Bailey soaring in the rarified air of John Grisham and Robert Dugoni, with a touch of Barry Reid thrown in for good measure. In fact, Reid’s Frank Galvin of The Verdict fame might be the best comparison out there, another hero battling their demons while coming up against powerful forces waging all-out war. One of those books you can’t get out of your head after you finish it.
The Lemon Twist by Élan Les Vies
I never thought I’d be reviewing a figure skating thriller, but that was before the Quad God Ilia Malinin brought the sport into the mainstream. In Élan Les Vies’ stunningly effective The Lemon Twist, Iris Sailor’s career in the sport didn’t last long enough to gain fame from such a signature move, thanks to a devastating fall.
That fall upends her career, but gives her a chance to mend fences with her sister who’s been absent from the family for three years. But a series of clues in the form of a postcard and, especially, a series of cassette tapes reveals sister Sam didn’t walk away on her own. But here’s the problem and the devilishly effective twist: The fall on the ice left Iris’ memory impaired, leaving her totally dependent on those cryptic clues to track Sam down, even as her memory begins to return in fits and starts, reminding me a bit of the brilliant Christopher Nolan film Memento.
The Lemon Twist is a psychological thriller of the highest order, a fully realized tale by a young author we can expect to see a lot more of. One hint: As soon as you think you’ve figured everything out, keep thinking!
