Things are starting to heat up with some of the summer’s most thrilling reads — from tropical mystery romps and gritty crime noir to timely true crime and prophetic sci-fi, there’s plenty for everyone to enjoy.
Never Flinch by Stephen King
Time has nothing on Stephen King. A half century after he staked his claim to the horror genre, he’s still at it with no signs of letting up. To that point, his latest Never Flinch never wavers in its commitment to relentless entertainment and pitch-perfect pacing.
Imagine a madman, a true human monster, promising to kill fourteen people, thirteen of them random innocents, is a twisted act of vengeful comeuppance. Fortunately, the local cop who receives the letter promising just that is acquainted with Holly Gibney, paranormal and crime fiction’s most unique detective. We’ve seen Holly before but never quite like this, as she brings her unique and hardly traditional talents to multiple, potentially interconnected cases. Ever since her debut in Mr. Mercedes, she has evolved from a one-off eccentric to a fully realized character capable of driving a book.
King’s evolution as a writer has been a wonder to behold. He has replaced the blistering originality of the early titles that launched him with a savvy, seasoned expansion across multiple genres and different brands of monsters. His legacy will not just be as the greatest American horror writer ever, but one of the great novelists period in our literary history.
Fever Beach by Carl Hiaasen
Carl Hiaasen swings for the fences and hits a literary homerun with his latest Florida-based romp Fever Beach, a scathingly satirical take on the American condition of today.
This time out, amid the cast of detestable misfits and deplorable miscreants, are right-wing crusader Dale Figgo and typically lecherous congressman Clure Boyette (Yup, that’s his name.). To counter their lunacy, Hiaasen serves up a pair of stiff-spined normals in Viva Morales and Twilly Spree. Viva happens to work for a clueless elderly couple fond of building whatever they can display their name on. Twilly, meanwhile, reads like a younger version of Hiaasen’s wondrous Skink, taking up the mantel of violent action against environmental despoilers in the tradition of the reclusive former Florida governor. That Viva and Twilly are destined to join forces to run Figgo and Boyette’s plans off the rails is never in doubt, the only question being how much laughter we’ll be treated to in the process.
On top of his last effort, Squeeze Me, with Fever Beach, Hiaasen reclaims the mojo from early classics like Skin Tight and Tourist Season. He’s always great but the crazed turn our politics has taken seems to have set his creative juices afire to the point that his thinly veiled commentary serves as a side-splitting escape from the news cycle. Hiaasen’s keen eye and sharp is destined to make him the best social satirist not just now, but ever.
King of Ashes by S.A. Crosby
S.A. Crosby has rocketed to literary fame on the backs of edgy, gritty tales that have set the bar for contemporary crime novels. But his latest, King of Ashes, takes him to even greater heights.
Roman Carruthers has no choice but to return home after his father’s car accident imperils the family’s mortuary business. Roman much prefers crunching numbers to embalming corpses, and his well-off clients to those lying on a slab. That’s a tough enough lifestyle change on its own, even before Roman has to take responsibility for his ne’er-do-well little brother Dante, who’s run afoul of local gangsters in their sleepy, backwater Virginia hometown. Never mind the fact that those gangsters were responsible for putting his father in the hospital in the first place as a harbinger of worse things to come.
King of Ashes cements Crosby’s status as the undisputed modern master of crime noir. His dialogue crackles with authenticity and his staccato prose is a wonder to behold. There will never be a successor to the throne of Elmore Leonard, but Crosby is as close as we’ll ever get.
Death of an Ex by Delia Pitts
It might be a slight to call Delia Pitts the female S.A. Crosby, given the ground she’s already staked out for herself in the crime world. But I’m going to do it anyway, in large part because her latest, Death of an Ex, serves up an equally satisfying smorgasbord of delicious noir mixed with a heaping helping of angst-riddled characters climbing in and out of despair.
Queenstown, New Jersey may seem like an unusual place to set a crime story, but it’s home to brilliant and tortured private investigator Vandy Myrick. And home is what she needs in the wake of her losing her daughter, especially when her ex-husband resurfaces in her life. That is, until he’s murdered. Solving that murder becomes the salve Vandy desperately needs to save herself, as she sorts through a morass that straddles the past and the present.
Death of an Ex is a deliciously decadent, fully realized character study of epic proportions. Pitts actually reminds me a lot of the great Walter Mosely when he was writing the early novels that put him on the bestseller map. Pitts is destined to follow his footsteps, though I suspect she may end up leaving even bigger prints.
Her First Mistake by Kendra Elliot
Cold cases inevitably provide great fodder for crime thrillers, and Kendra Elliot proves remarkably adept at mining that trope with her latest sizzler of a story, Her First Mistake.
Noelle Marshall is lucky to be alive, considering she survived the same home invasion that claimed her husband and local politico Derrick Bell’s life. A dozen years later, new evidence emerges that leads the FBI to reopen the case in the hope of identifying the killer at long last. Lo and behold, there are skeletons in Noelle’s closet dating back to the night of that murder in the form of long-buried secrets. Those secrets bubble back up to the surface after the cold case gets hot again, apparently placing her life in jeopardy.
Her First Mistake is a psychological thriller extraordinaire. Your only mistake is not picking it up.
The Blue Horse by Bruce Borgos
Bruce Borgos sprints out of the gate and never stops galloping forward in The Blue Horse, an especially apt metaphor given his latest Porter Beck mystery prominently features horses in its plotline.
Wild ones, in particular, being rounded up by helicopter instead of traditional methods. Then that helicopter crashes, thanks to the pilot being shot around the same time a Bureau of Land Management administrator is savagely murdered. Good thing Sheriff Porter Beck and his latest girlfriend Detective Charlie Blue are on the job. Then their investigation gets even more complicated in a hurry, thanks to kids on a wilderness retreat unearthing more than just something they can use for extra credit.
Borgos’s foremost strength of multi-layered plotting with escalating stakes and tension is on prime display here. With The Blue Horse, he draws even with C.J. Box when it comes to outdoor-based crime thrillers and Beck is every bit the equal of Box’s Joe Pickett. Riveting and relentless.
Boystown by John Shannon
John Shannon juggles multiple plotlines with skill and aplomb in his fifteenth crime novel to feature old-school Los Angeles private detective Jack Liffey, Boystown.
Liffey’s daughter Maeve plays a big role this time out, in large part because her father is still recovering from heart surgery. That recovery can’t come fast enough, once a gay social warrior goes missing at the same time open warfare breaks out in the streets of West Hollywood between gun-toting thugs and Russian mercenaries. Maeve’s clearly in over her head, which gives her a new appreciation for her father’s ability to negotiate the dark world she finds herself mired in and creates a fresh dynamic for their relationship to enjoy if they can survive.
Not since Raymond Chandler has an author staked his claim to the neon-noir of Los Angeles and Tinsel Town. Shannon now shares that hallowed ground with the great Robert Crais, and Boystown cements Liffey’s reputation as one of the greatest crime writers alive today or anytime.
Prescription for Pain: How a Once-Promising Doctor Became the Pill Mill Killer by Philip Eil
I always love including a nonfiction title in this column and Philip Eil’s Prescription for Pain: How a Once-Promising Doctor Became the Pill Mill Killer is the perfect choice for this one, given its timeliness and superb reporting.
At heart, the book centers on a Faustian figure who represents the kind of mentality that spawned the national nightmare of opioids. Dr. Paul Volkman, a once most promising physician, sells his soul to the devil in the form of the pill mills that fed addicts’ increasing dependence on the drugs. In this case, those mills span southern Ohio, but the story’s starkly similar everywhere. And, like all monsters, he somehow managed to avoid detection despite being linked to more than thirty deaths.
Prescription for Pain serves up a wondrously in-depth take on the opioid crisis that continues to roil the nation. Eil’s brilliant research and reportage are matched only by his ability to construct a thrilling and unputdownable narrative, in the fashion of John Carreyrou’s Bad Blood, that takes us deep into the heart of darkness at the crisis’s core. True crime doesn’t get any better than this.
The Exodus Heresy by Glenn Parris
Glenn Parris’ versatility is on keen display in The Exodus Heresy as he diverges from the crack thriller form he displayed in The Painkillers to science fiction with a dash of fantasy thrown in for good measure.
Those genres, or some combination thereof, are chock full of prophecies as plot points, which is exactly what we’re served up here. That prophecy comes from young Shon Tai and predicts nothing less than the end of the world. What he doesn’t know is at whose hand the destruction will be wrought and how quickly. The prophecy also makes no mention of the fact that he is the (reluctant) hero destined to save his people.
All hardcore science fiction involves world-building, but only the best of the bunch successfully add a deeply held and well-conceived mythology to that mix. In The Exodus Heresy, Parris constructs a beautifully developed one with echoes of both Dune and Foundation. That’s a high bar but one he proves himself worthy of in this stunning and scintillating series debut.
