September’s Best New Thrillers

The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye, by David Lagercrantz
Even from solitary confinement in prison, Lisbeth Salander is an unstoppable force in Lagercrantz’s second book continuing Stieg Larsson’s Millennium series. The prison she’s held in is poorly run, with the inmates more in charge than the guards, but her hacking skills and sharp intelligence mean she’s as effective inside as she was out. Her old ally Mikael Blomkvist visits once a week, and she passes him a lead related to her still-mysterious childhood: a respected stockbroker named Leo Mannheimer she believes is connected to the psychiatric unit where she was confined against her will as a child. As Blomkvist does what he does best, Salander turns her attentions to the injustices in her new home, as intolerable to her in prison as they would be in the free world.

Enemy of the State, by Kyle Mills
The 16th Mitch Rapp novel (and third by Mills since Vince Flynn’s passing) finds Rapp enlisted by the president to clean up a growing mess in Saudi Arabia, as rival factions of the royal family and the government fund terrorists and plot against one anther, sowing chaos and supporting ISIS. Rapp employs his usual steady professionalism, assembling the sort of team you can rely on to carry out the high-level maneuvers required—including his lover, Claudia Gould, his former enemy Grisha Azarov, and former army sniper turned drug runner Kent Black. The seemingly impossible mission requires a clever plan, but as usual, readers can rest assured Rapp has one.

Sleeping Beauties, by Stephen King and Owen King
King and his son Owen team up for a book with a timely, terrifying premise: what if, in the very near future, most of the women in the world simply went to sleep and didn’t wake up? Covered in cocoon-like white membranes, the women become feral attackers if disturbed. the Kings being Kings, they set the action in a depressed Appalachian town whose main employer is a women’s prison. Men, left to their own devices, don’t react well, and society begins to unravel even as the question of what’s happening with the female half of the population lingers. One woman named Evie who appears immune, and might be a savior—or some sort of demon come to supervise the downfall of man. Filled with smart social commentary and larger-than-life characters, this is a top-notch collaboration from the biggest family name in the business..

Haunted, by James Patterson and James O. Born
The 10th Michael Bennett novel finds the detective and his family exhausted from a series of crises and in need of a vacation. On the advice of a colleague, Bennett takes them to a beautiful small town on the edge of the woods in Maine, a place that initially seems the perfect place to unplug, recharge, and hibernate. It isn’t long before the sleepy facade is shattered and Bennett is called on to assist in the investigation of a rash of missing teens. When the bodies start to turn up, the truth comes with them: the town is gripped by an addiction epidemic that brings with it horrific violence that shocks even Bennett, a man who has seen some things. A fight for the soul of the town commences, and once again, Bennett is on the front lines.

The Cuban Affair, by Nelson DeMille
Set in 2015, just as relations between the United States and Cuba were beginning to warm up, DeMille’s latest digs into the side of the story that often gets overlooked: the Cuban expats living in the U.S. who hate the Castro regime and who abandoned their property, wealth, and standing when they fled. Daniel “Mac” MacCormick is a veteran of Afghanistan trying to make his way out from under a mountain of debt with his charter boat business in Key West—and failing. When he’s offered a lot of money to assist in the recovery of money and documents from a remote cave in Cuba, he agrees out of desperation, ferrying a beautiful woman to Havana. When things go wrong, Mac finds himself depending on her—without knowing if he can trust her one bit.

The Romanov Ransom, by Clive Cussler and Robin Burcell
Cussler and Burcell combine old-school Nazis, neo-Nazis, a lost Romanov ransom, and Sam and Remi Fargo into a rollicking adventure that begins with a kidnapping. The crime brings the ransom—a fortune paid to the Bolsheviks in 1918 to secure the release of the Russian imperial family, but diverted mysteriously, sealing the fate of the Tsar and his children. The ransom was later stolen by the Germans, and is now being held by descendants of a Nazi group calling themselves the Werewolves, who intend to use the money to establish a Fourth Reich. The Fargos plunge into their trademark global adventure, but this time, the stakes are much higher, as they have a chance to not only prevent something awful, but to bring an century-old crime to light.

A Legacy of Spies, by John le Carré
John le Carré is not only back, he’s bringing George Smiley with him—or at least Smiley’s assistant, Peter Guillam, called upon to fill in the blanks on an old operation called Windfall, now that the British government is being sued over some of the unintended casualties of the Cold War. Guillam begins piecing together the truth behind Windfall, digging through old files, listening to interrogations, and supplementing these discoveries with his own reliable memories. As usual in a le Carré novel, the combination of meticulous detail, skillful spycraft, and moral blankness makes for a slow-boil thriller that slowly increases the tension to unendurable levels. The intelligence and (above all) patience of the men and women working in intelligence becomes as thrilling as any gunplay.

Good Me Bad Me, by Ali Land
In Land’s sizzling debut, 15-year-old Annie Thompson tells the police that her mother, Ruth, is a serial killer who lures young children to their deaths. Ruth is arrested, and Annie changes her name to Milly and goes to live with psychologist Mike Newton and his family as he prepares her to testify. But Milly doesn’t have an easy time of it; resented by Mike’s daughter, she is bullied at school and finds herself hearing her mother’s disembodied voice, advising her to follow her nature. Is it possible to escape your legacy, or are you doomed to repeat your parents’ mistakes?

The Child Finder, by Rene Denfeld
Naomi Cottle was kidnapped as a child—although her memories only begin with a flight through a dark strawberry field. Raised in foster homes, she is still broken by things she can’t remember, and has dedicated her life to being a “child finder,” called in by devastated families to find missing children when the trail has grown cold. Naomi never gives up, sometimes finding the children dead, sometimes alive. When she’s called in to search for Madison Culver, who disappeared three years before and is presumed to have frozen to death, the family is still holding out hope. And rightly so—as Naomi struggles to stay connected to her foster family and her sense of self, Madison begins narrating her terrifying imprisonment with a man she calls “B.”

Best Day Ever, by Kaira Rouda
Paul and Mia Strom are as close to perfect as you can get: happily married with two great kids, plenty of money, and even a vacation home off of Lake Erie. But Mia hasn’t been feeling well, and Paul…well, Paul isn’t who he seems to be. When he drops the kids with the babysitter and whisks Mia off for a quick trip to the lake house, determined to give her the “best day ever,” it’s part of a plan to put the shine back on his marriage to a woman he chose deliberately, for very specific reasons. As the truth Paul has been hiding begins to reveal itself, he discovers Mia is hardly the pushover he thought—and the couple’s best day ever slowly curdles into a dark adventure, dripping with tension and suspense.