Thrillers: Noir delights will bring a chill to summer

One of the best things about the dog days of August is the annual release of the latest from Sandra Brown. This summer’s offering is the bold and bracing hard-boiled crime thriller “Thick as Thieves” (Grand Central, 448 pages, $28), perhaps her most ambitious and best-realized effort ever.

The book opens, as many crime novels do, with a flashback to a heist gone bad. In the present, the youngest of the ill-fated crew, Ledge Burnet, returns to Caddo Lake, Texas, ready to bury the past once and for all. But the past continues to tug at him in the form of classic femme fatale Aden Maxell, who knows where the bodies are buried and is determined to add more to the pile. She seeks to make Ledge a party to what she’s planning, and he appears to be putty in her hands, even as he seeks his own dark redemption.

Brown had long made the transition from romantic suspense to hardcore thriller writer seem effortless. But she reaches the heights of masters like Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett in “Thick as Thieves,” spinning a tale steeped in noir and nuance that’s utterly riveting from the first page to the last.

Speaking of great crime thrillers, Ace Atkins is one of those writers consistently setting the bar for everyone else, the reasons for which are all front and center in “The Revelators” (Putnam, 386 pages, $28).

In his 10th outing, Atkins’ seminal ex-Army Ranger Quinn Colson is once again cast in the role of savior against a cadre of colorfully roguish figures determined to skirt the law at all costs. This time out, his antagonist is Fannie Hathcock, an old-school crime boss whose power is both undisputed and unchallenged. That is, until Colson assembles an Untouchables-like team to fight Hathcock on her own terms.

Atkins seems to be channeling a combination of Greg Iles and John Hart, two other writers adept at shrouding sleepy Southern noir in blood. The difference is that neither of those two — nor hardly any author, for that matter — is capable of weaving such a complex web of competing narratives that coalesce to form a masterpiece of both form and function.

Hank Phillippi Ryan’s scintillating and superb “The First to Lie” (Forge, 352 pages, $27.99) is as much morality tale as thriller.

That’s because this standalone by the much-lauded investigative journalist from Boston’s WHDH presents us with the depraved depths to which people will sink to get what they want. The book features the rotating perspectives of characters battling themselves and each other in the form of Nora Quinn, Ellie Berenson and Meg West. A sinister pharmaceutical concern is the common denominator between them, along with the lies and deceit they all resort to in a classic take on the old adage that everything is indeed relative.

“The First to Lie” is a splendid piece of post-modern noir in which the darkness rests in the souls of both the aggrieved and their aggrievers. This is crime writing at its level best, challenging the traditional notions of heroism as well as structure.

Speaking of noir, this must be the month for it, since T. Jefferson Parker’s typically terrific “Then She Vanished” (Putnam, 352 pages, $27) is shaded in murky tones and populated by characters of questionable ethics at best.

The only one whose ethics remain unquestioned is private detective and former Marine Roland Ford, back for his fourth go-round in this San Diego-based mystery series. Even that city’s brilliant sunshine has trouble piercing the darkness of what he’s facing this time out in the form of politico Dalton Strait, whose wife has disappeared. This as the city is roiled by a series of bombings as unrest laid partially at Strait’s feet bubbles over into violence. Ford, of course, is no stranger to that, though taking on a group committed to chaos at all costs was not what he bargained for when he took the case.

The three-time Edgar Award-winning Parker’s lyrical language shines here as the light emanating through the darkness, helping to make “Then She Vanished” as great a novel as it is a mystery thriller. It’s the kind of book you savor like a fine wine to the very last sip.

The perfectly titled “Every Kind of Wicked” (Kensington, 325 pages, $26) by Lisa Black features one of the best pairings crime fiction has to offer in forensic expert Maggie Gardner (modeled after Black herself) and detective Jack Renner.

This time out, the stalwart duo find themselves following a trail that starts with the discovery of a body in a graveyard (I told you this was the month for noir!) and leads them to dirty dealings in medicine, thanks to some shady financial doings. Money, in books like this, seems to be at the root of all evil, although the fun in Black’s latest is watching Maggie’s ex-husband battling Renner for her soul as much as her heart, that is until one of them becomes a murder suspect himself.

Secrets abound in this stellar crime effort set in a revitalized Cleveland, which reveals that you can’t hide depravity behind a fresh coat of paint. “Every Kind of Wicked” is as masterfully constructed as it is beautifully realized. Not to be missed.

John Gilstrap shows once again why he is considered one of today’s top action-thriller writers in “Hellfire” (Kensington, 448 pages, $9.99).

His latest to feature hostage rescue specialist Jonathan Graves takes a decidedly personal turn when Graves finds himself on the trail of two kidnapped boys he took responsibility for when they had no one else. Turns out it’s an especially nasty, and desperate, Mexican cartel that’s behind the snatching of the boys. But that cartel only makes for one faction of bad guys Graves must deal with if he’s going to recover the kids.

In “Hellfire,” Gilstrap proves himself to have a light, deft hand from an emotional standpoint, the same hand wielding a hammer for the action he’s known for. After a dozen books featuring his seminal hero, he continues to get better, and so does Graves himself.

Jenny Milchman commands the page the way the best actors command the stage in “The Second Mother” (Source Books, 454 pages, $26.99).

The book’s hero, Julie Weathers, just wanted to get a fresh start by moving to the isolated Mercy Island off the coast of Maine, where she’s taken the job as teacher to the local children. All seems well, until in a fashion befitting Ira Levin’s “The Stepford Wives” or Thomas Tryon’s “The Other,” Julie’s new life begins to unravel as she realizes the terrifying truth behind the locals’ insular world.

Milchman brings the suspense from a simmer to a slow boil, as “The Second Mother” becomes an agonizing exercise in escape and survival. This is the kind of book Alfred Hitchcock would have loved to adapt into a film, and for good reason.

Count me among those who love to dabble in anthologies from time to time, for the immediate gratification their stories offer. With that in mind, I found “Fractus Europa: Stories” (Dunn Books, 310 pages, $24.95) to be among the most prescient and thought-provoking collections I’ve ever encountered.

Edited by Eric Anderson and Adam Dunn, the European-centric stories are all set in a near future raked by social and economic strife beyond even what the headlines bring us every morning today. I’d never heard of a single one of the contributors before, and after reading their stories, I was left wondering why. A sampling of the subjects includes American-Russian frayed relations, Brexit, health care, Ukraine and plenty more of tomorrow’s headlines.

Those potential headlines, it turns out, make great fodder for these thinking man’s/woman’s tales that might not make the next “Twilight Zone” reboot, but stand on their own as beautifully drawn landscapes upon a global geopolitical canvas.

— Jon Land (jonlandauthor@aol.com) has published many thrillers, including his latest, “Strong from the Heart: A Caitlin Strong Novel.” He lives in Providence.