A Thriller for Every Week of Summer 2017

No Middle Name, by Lee Child
Out in mid-May, this new Jack Reacher novella (combined with previously published Reacher short stories) is the perfect way to ease into your summer reading rampage. Jack Reacher is one of the most popular thriller characters of all time for a reason, and the brevity of these stories means you can get your brain limbered up before your thriller binge begins in earnest in June.

June

May 30: You Will Pay, by Lisa Jackson
Sleepaway camps and the teen counselors who staff them have been so much grist for the horror movie mill, but Jackson smartly sees adult thriller potential in the setup. Twenty years ago, a group of teenage counselors decided to play a prank on one of their own, only to see it go horribly awry. In the present day, one of them, Lucas Dalton, is a detective with the sheriff’s department who catches onto the discovery of human remains at the old camp site—and soon the events of that fateful night come back to haunt everyone involved. As the other counselors—each with a piece of the puzzle—return home to tell their story, everyone begins receiving ominous texts that read, simply, “You will pay.” And then people start to die.

June 6: Camino Island, by John Grisham
Grisham is as reliable a writer as they come; his novels are always twisty, exciting, and intelligent, and he always finds a way of illuminating walks of life you might not be familiar with. Camino Island kicks off with an unusual heist, seeing the theft of priceless books from Princeton University’s vault, housed below the Firestone Library. On Camino Island in Florida, Bruce Cable owns a small rare bookstore, and secretly dabbles in black market books of the priceless variety. A struggling writer named Mercer Mann is offered a dubious job: infiltrate Cable’s inner circle, get close to his sources, and learn his methods. But as Mercer gets in deeper, she realizes she’s in over her head.

June 13: The Ultimatum, by Karen Robards
Bianca St. Ives was born into the family business—swindling con artists out of their ill-gotten gains. As one of the elite criminals who rob other criminals, she’s known as The Guardian—but the fact that she targets criminals doesn’t get her a pass from law enforcement. After a job goes horribly wrong, ending with her father (and mentor) dead and a fortune in cash and a cache of top-secret documents missing, the blame falls directly on her. The government doesn’t think her father is really dead, though—and they intend on using her as bait to draw him out of hiding. Using every bit of her unusual skill set, Bianca has to figure out who’s behind it all, and how to get out from under it, setting off a whirlwind global race you’ll follow all the way to the breathless finish.

June 20: The Silent Corner, by Dean Koontz
Keep your momentum going with Koontz’s latest, a twisted inversion of Atlas Shrugged that finds talented, accomplished people committing suicide all over the country. When FBI agent Jane Hawk’s husband becomes the latest to succumb, she refuses to believe the apparent facts of the case and launches her own investigation into her brilliant husband’s death—and quickly finds herself a wanted woman, pursued by forces both seen and insidious. Someone powerful is protecting a terrible secret, and will stop at nothing to keep it from coming to light. But they’ve underestimated Jane—her intelligence, her courage, and her love for her husband.

June 27: Use of Force, by Brad Thor
Put June to bed in style with the 16th Scot Horvath novel from Brad Thor. After issuing a mysterious, blood-curdling distress call during a terrible storm in the Mediterranean Sea, the body of a legendary terrorist washes up on an Italian shore. When he’s identified, the CIA is thrown into chaos, believing he might be connected to rumors of a “spectacular” attack against the United States they’ve been monitoring. With no time to spare, but needing plausible deniability, they hire Horvath to pursue the scant clues they have; being unofficial, Horvath can do things even the CIA can’t do. But this time, even he may not be able to beat the clock.

July

July 4: A Game of Ghosts, by John Connolly
With July comes Independence Day, so celebrate with a rollicking Charlie Parker novel from Connolly—the 15th in this bestselling thriller series with a touch (sometimes more than a touch) of the supernatural. Parker is once again tapped by the FBI to do its dirty work, this time tracking down a private investigator who was doggedly pursuing a series of mysterious deaths somehow connected to the locations of reported hauntings. Parker enters a shadowy world of criminals where nothing is what it seems and monstrous people propose monstrous—but ever so tempting—bargains. Parker is used to terrible crimes and disturbing violence, so he keeps pushing…but maybe this is the time he pushes too far.

July 11: Two Nights, by Kathy Reichs
Reichs steps away from her uber-popular Temperance Brennan series for the first time with a standalone thriller introducing Sunday Night, a woman with a traumatic past she has carefully buried beneath a heavy firewall of denial. Alone, with her emotions carefully controlled, she believes she’s untouchable. Then she’s asked to help a desperate family: a bomb has gone off, and a little girl is missing. No one knows if she died in the explosion, ran away, or was taken. Sunnie agrees to help, even as the case picks away at her carefully arranged defenses, leaving her more vulnerable than she has been in years. Soon, she’s retracing the steps of two young children: the missing girl, and the girl she once was.

July 18: The Break Down, by B.A. Paris
Paris’ clever thriller pivots on a situation most will find chillingly familiar: a woman named Cass sees a driver on the side of the road, trying to flag down help near a broken-down car. Cass drives past without stopping, then later learns the motorist was brutally murdered. She begins to receive phone calls during which no one speaks, and her fear she has inherited her mother’s early-onset dementia are brought to the fore as her grip on details and memories slips. She comes to rely more and more on her husband and her best friend, who never liked each other—but this is one of those books in which no one is above suspicion. Ever.

July 25: Deadfall, by Linda Fairstein
You might not think wildlife conservation and civil service could combine to produce a tense, gripping thriller, but Fairstein will prove you wrong as July comes to a close. When a city employee and old friend of Assistant District Attorney Alexandra Cooper is found murdered, Cooper works with NYPD detectives Mike Chapman and Mercer Wallace to get to the bottom of it. This leads them into the surprisingly dark and dangerous world of illegal animal imports, shady big-game hunting, and corruption at the highest levels.

August

August 1: The Dark Net, by Benjamin Percy
Percy ushers in August with this tense thriller based on the real-life “dark net,” the mysterious, hidden nodes on the internet where illegal substances and goods—as well as shockingly depraved opinions—are traded on a daily basis. Except it’s not just drugs and pornography gathering on the dark net; evil spirits are accumulating there as well, safe from light and prying eyes, and ready to swarm virally into the world. An unexpected, unwilling team of people slowly become our only hope of stopping the attack: a blind girl whose high-tech visual prosthetic allows her to see things others can’t, a journalist who hates technology, a former child evangelist who has been preparing to literally fight his personal demons for years, and a hacker who believes he’s gathering an army to defend the Internet. Together, they’re the only thing standing between the world and eternal darkness.

August 8: Barely Legal, by Stuart Woods & Parnell Hall
Herbie Fisher has been a supporting player in Woods’ Stone Barrington books for years, moving from comedy relief as the sad-sack incompetent to a sharp lawyer benefiting from Barrington’s occasionally tough-love tutelage. Now Barrington is the minor character, as Woods partners up with Parnell Hall for a thriller featuring Herbie Fisher as the lead. Barrington has only a cameo, as Fisher has to fend for himself after getting entangled in a court case that sees the deck stacked against him even before he’s framed for murder. Herbie has learned well from Barrington, and when he realizes he’s the only person who can save the day, he heads out—alone—risking everything. It’s perfect for fans of Stone Barrington and Stuart Woods newcomers alike.

August 15: Exposed, by Lisa Scottoline
Scottoline is a master of tension, and in the middle of the dog days of August, her newest will hit the shelves to shock you out of a heat-induced torpor. The fifth book in any series is often reliably static, but Scottoline goes the other way in her fifth Rosato & DiNunzio thriller. When an old friend of Mary DiNunzio wants to bring a wrongful termination suit against her former employer, Mary naturally wants to help—but Bennie Rosato represents the company that fired him. This conflict of interest turns into an epic battle between partners, leading to skullduggery and legal maneuvering that pits friend against friend and forces everyone to choose sides. Then things get deadly, changing the game and making the pages turn a little bit faster.

August 22: Y Is For…, by Sue Grafton
Wind up the summer with a sure thing: the newest Kinsey Millhone mystery from the great Sue Grafton. Y starts off in 1979, when four teenage boys at a private school for the wealthy sexually assault a young girl—and film themselves doing it. The tape goes missing, and another boy at school is suspected; though he winds up murdered, the tape remains lost. The boys turn on each other and two of them go to prison—but their leader disappears. Ten years later, one of the boys is released from jail, only to become a prisoner in his own home. When a copy of the infamous tape arrives with a ransom note, Millhone is called in to help. As she gets her hands dirty working this dark case, she finds someone is leaving clues for her, too—clues that hint at a personal grudge against her.