The Best New Thrillers of March 2018

Red Alert, by James Patterson and Marshall Karp
The fifth NYPD Red book shows us the 1 percent of Manhattan’s elite behaving badly—and being murdered at an alarming rate. When a filmmaker’s sex games go wrong and a charity function is bombed in the same night, Detectives Zach Jordan and Kylie MacDonald of the NYPD Red division respond, putting aside their own romantic and sexual tension to protect the rich and famous. As their investigation deepens, even they are shocked at the level of depravity and corruption on display—and when their search for the truth puts powerful people in danger, they’ll have no one but each other to rely on.

The Escape Artist, by Brad Meltzer
Meltzer provides a riveting launch to his new series starring Jim “Zig” Zigarowski, a mortician working top-secret cases for the government at Dover Air Force base. When a military plane crashes in the Alaskan wilderness without explanation, he is tasked with the autopsy, and is shocked to discover he’ll be investigating the death of Nola Brown, a woman who saved his daughter’s life when both she and Nola were children. When Zig examines the body, however, certain identifying marks are missing—and there’s a note in the woman’s stomach addressing a warning to Nola. Convinced the corpse isn’t Nola at all, Zig sets off to find out where the real Nola is, leading him into a maze of government conspiracy that goes back a century.

The Rising Sea, by Clive Cussler and Graham Brown
Cussler and Brown’s latest Kurt Austin adventure offers up a climate change-themed story with a twist. Sea levels are rising, threatening to flood coastal areas  and cause unimaginable death and destruction—but it’s not due to global warming. A secretive Chinese group is deep-water mining a substance known as Golden Adamant, a “metamaterial” with unique properties allowing for the development of powerful technologies; a side-effect of the mining process is the release of huge quantities of water previously trapped in mineral deposits. It’s up to Austin and the rest of the National Underwater and Marine Agency’s special assignments team to stop this cataclysmic process.

The Bishop’s Pawn, by Steve Berry
The 13th Cotton Malone novel finds the skilled government operative trapped between the present and the past. Nearly two decades ago, a younger, less-experienced Malone was given an assignment to dive into the waters off the Florida coast to retrieve a stolen coin worth millions—but the mission was a lie. The case also contained documents related to an FBI program somehow involved with the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. In the present day, Malone receives a note saying simply “Fifty years have passed. Bring them.” He heads to Atlanta for a secret meeting, leaning in to a dangerous feud between the FBI and the Justice Department involving explosive revelations from the past that could change the world looks at history.

The Kremlin Conspiracy, by Joel C. Rosenberg
Rosenberg’s newest is a nail-biter spy story tracking the parallel careers of Russian attorney Oleg Kraskin, trusted son-in-law to the devious and dangerous Russian President Aleksandr Luganov; and Marcus Ryker, whose Marine heroism led him into the Secret Service and eventually the American president’s personal detail. As Luganov plots to reassert Russian might by invading the defenseless countries of the Baltic—using nuclear weapons if need be—Ryker and Kraskin are right in the mix on opposite sides of the conflict. As the crisis swells to apocalyptic proportions, it becomes clear that the one thing Luganov didn’t count on was Ryker, who comes back from a family tragedy with nothing to lose, willing to put everything on the line to prevent disaster.

Sometimes I Lie, by Alice Feeney
Amber Reynolds wakes up in a coma, her body paralyzed and her memories muddled. Slowly, pieces of her life come back to her—her anxiety over her radio presenter job, her suspicions that her husband Paul has fallen in love with her sister Claire. As she tries to piece everything together, events from her childhood seep back into her consciousness, indicating that this is all part of something much larger—and darker—than a straying husband or simple family drama. Amber’s own mind plays tricks on her as she lays helplessly, struggling to remember—and no one who enters her room, including the mysterious man Amber doesn’t recognize, is aware that she can hear everything they say.

The Flight Attendant, by Chris Bohjalian
Cassie Bowden is a globe-trotting flight attendant with a serious drinking problem, often waking up in strange places with no memory of her adventures. When she meets a handsome financier on a flight to Dubai, she isn’t surprised to come to next to him in a swanky hotel room, her head pounding—but she is surprised to find the bed soaked in blood, and her one night stand dead, the victim of an assassination. The contract killer, Elena, spared Cassie in a moment of sympathy—a choice she regrets in the bright light of day. Cassie is used to lying to cover up her drunken exploits, and she goes into deception overdrive to save her own skin, navigating suspicious police and a professional killer intent on correcting her mistake.

The Sandman, by Lars Kepler
The fourth Detective Inspector Joona Linna novel focuses on a serial murderer named Jurek Walter, convicted of two killings but suspected in dozens more, and serving a sentence in a high-security psychiatric ward. When one of his apparent victims, Mikael Kobler-Frost, suddenly reappears alive, he confirms Joona’s long-held suspicion that Walter didn’t work alone. Not only does Mikael describe his captor—referring to him as the Sandman—he insists that his sister Felicia is still alive, and in the Sandman’s clutches. In order to discover the location of the madman, Joona’s colleague Inspector Saga Bauer is sent into the psyche ward to pose as a patient and get information out of Walter, setting off a tense battle of wits and wills as time slowly runs out for the poor girl.

The Girl in the Moon, by Terry Goodkind
Angela Constantine survived horrific violence in her childhood, circumstances which might be to blame for her ability to identify killers simply by gazing into their eyes. Spurred by her bitter experience, she uses this peculiar talent to find men who abuse women, and executes them with cold brutality, making them suffer for their crimes before disposing of their bodies in a pit under her house. When events make Angela the target of a violent terrorist group, she realizes she might be the only person who knows what they intend to do, and the only person in the world capable of stopping them. Using her special ability and a lifetime of rage against those who would victimize others, Angela is the world’s best hope.

Tangerine, by Christine Mangan
This dark throwback mystery-thriller focuses on the easily manipulated Alice and the dominant, vivacious Lucy, who met at college in the 1950s and became extremely close—until a man came between them, and a tragic accident that might have been no such thing drove them further apart. Years later, the women meet again in Tangier, where Alice has moved with her new husband. While Alice is miserable in the foreign land, Lucy loves it. When Alice begins to suspect her husband may have cheated, her emotional fragility gives Lucy an opening to reclaim her place as Lucy’s closest confidant—but the rekindled friendship quickly falls into a familiar, dangerous pattern—a pattern that ended in tragedy before, and might wind up much worse this time around.