Bethanne Patrick

George Pelecanos' The Man Who Came Uptown may appear like another detective thriller novel, but a richer philosophy on prison literacy lies beneath its plot.

Lea Carpenter's new novel combines literary sensibility with genre readability, for a dark spy thriller about a young woman finding out all kinds of strange truths about her father's past in the CIA.

Akashic Books' Noir series visits Baghdad for its latest installment, and the talented writers collected here manage to wrest compelling noir from a place that's plenty dark already.

Megan Abbott's new novel follows two women with a troubled past who meet again, working in the lab of a powerful scientist. It's a slow-burning story whose final explosion is a true surprise.

Television investigative reporter Jeremy Finley brings his small-screen experience to bear in this debut novel, a satisfyingly suspenseful thriller with overtones of The X-Files and Stranger Things.

Jim Crace's superb new novel is a trickster — it seems to be a bittersweet tale of late-life love, but then it becomes a meditation on gentrification and the toll poverty can take on human beings.

Some of the sex scenes in Fuminori Nakamura's new novel Cult X will disturb you — but that's beside the point, because the book has much more disturbing things to say about groupthink and free will.

The latest installment of the Hogarth Shakespeare series sees crime novelist Nesbo taking on the Scottish Play in an adaptation that comes alive the farther he strays from Shakespeare's original.

Christine Mangan's new novel, set in Morocco in the 1950s, centers on the sinister tension between two ex-friends — but the dusty, detailed Moroccan scenery sometimes gets in the way of the story.

This tale of an RAF pilot, the Italian woman who rescues him after a crash, and 30 years later, his daughter, is so skillful and comforting that you may not even notice the fact that there's a war on.