Thrillers, Suspense & Mystery
Browse our collection of thrillers, suspense & mystery book reviews
Fallen Kings: Unholy Secrets
June Gillam (Gorilla Girl Ink)
Fallen Kings: Unholy Secrets by June Gillam is set during one sweltering summer, the sixth book in the Hillary Broome mystery that stretches from a Pride parade in Sacramento to the cobblestone streets of Rome. Professor and reluctant sleuth Hillary travels to Italy with her husband Ed, her estranged mother Paisley, and her teenage daughter Claire for what should be a dream vacation: a college tour, basketball camp, and gelato. Instead, Dei Patri...
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The Phantom Skipjack
Robert Gill, Jr. (Teaching Press Publishing)
Robert Gill, Jr.’s The Phantom Skipjack: A Carroway Island Story is a spellbinding maritime mystery that opens at Haddie's Fish Shak on Carroway Island, a Chesapeake Bay community with “more stories than people.” When a visiting stranger puzzles over an 1857 photograph of men standing on the frozen bay, old waterman Crazy Jack Mercer launches into the tale of the Great Freeze, a winter so brutal it trapped the ferry, cut off supplies, and turned...
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The Frequency
Randall D. St. Claire (Atmosphere Press)
The Frequency by Randall D. St. Claire tells the story of Bronx Rousselle, a former minor-league hockey enforcer and Marine veteran now working as a pawnbroker in Warroad, Minnesota. Heather Li, a nurse, trades a box of Inuit artifacts in exchange for a discreet flight out of town, and Bronx reluctantly agrees. The box contains cryptic letters from her shaman great-grandfather describing a whale that turned into stone. That single deal disrupts B...
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In The Mountain
Dottie Lee (Atmosphere Press)
Dottie Lee’s In the Mountain drops readers into a top-secret facility buried deep inside a mountain. After a catastrophic earthquake, the central Tube collapses, the glass shatters, and floors slide into the abyss, killing most of the staff and leaving a handful of survivors, including Trace, Paul, Pearl, and Joseph, who escape through an emergency exit into the suffocating darkness beyond the Wall. What follows is a struggle for survival as the...
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Into the Eye
James Houston Turner (Regis Books (an imprint of Ruby Rock Films))
James Houston Turner’s Into the Eye is a geopolitical thriller that introduces former KGB colonel Aleksandr Talanov, who is thrust into the heart of a diabolical human-trafficking network in central Africa. Tasked with the covert KTAC team, Talanov must locate and rescue Dr. Shawni Juma, a virologist who has uncovered evidence linking the brutal warlord Ojo Mutebi to the wealthy communist ideologue Istvan Szabo. When a rescue helicopter is betray...
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Trolling for Murder (A Vashon Island Mystery)
Charlotte Stuart (Colvos Publishing)
In Charlotte Stuart's Trolling for Murder, workplace investigator Lavender “Lew” Lewis discovers the body of Quin Armstrong at the base of Vashon Island's iconic Bird King Troll sculpture, a note declaring him “no friend of nature” taped to the wooden giant's pointing finger. When high school teacher Audrey Young becomes the prime suspect due to volatile confrontations about bullying, Lew digs into the victim's extensive list of enemies—from feud...
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The Matriarch Mission
Maxime Trencavel (Tail of the Bird Books)
Maxime Trencavel’s The Matriarch Mission opens in 1913 Crimea, where thirteen-year-old Oksana Mangupli, a bookish Krymchak girl, follows her dying grandmother into a mystical cavern and encounters Asherah, an ancient divine feminine force. This meeting launches Oksana into a decades-spanning saga weaving through the Russian Revolution, Bolshevik terror, and World War II, as she follows her destiny as a woman of the “bump”—a genetic marker linking...
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Second Term
J.M. Adams (Oceanview Publishing)
Second Term by J.M. Adams is a propulsive political thriller that links two explosive timelines: the catastrophic 2012 Benghazi attack and a dystopian January 2029, where outgoing President Terrance Locke refuses to concede defeat and orchestrates a second, far deadlier Capitol insurrection to retain power. The narrative follows Cora Walker, a decorated covert operative code-named “Bronco” who survived Benghazi only to find herself battling domes...
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Bait - A Harper Jones Novel
Jeffrey Butler (Self)
In Jeffrey Butler's relentless thriller Bait, Detective Harper Jones of Wolf Hollow, North Carolina, hunts a car bomber when the ghosts of his past as a black-ops soldier come calling. Ten years ago, a mission to eliminate a Corsican arms dealer ended in disaster, leaving Harper believing his teammate and lover Josie was dead. Now, a vengeful crime syndicate, the mysterious Rosanera, has targeted Harper and his family, delivering a severed pig’s...
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Poison Pill (Dr. Mark Lin Medical Thrillers Book 3)
Anthony Lee (Independently Published)
In Poison Pill by Anthony Lee, Dr. Mark Lin, a hospitalist at Ivory Memorial Hospital, uncovers a lethal conspiracy linking two seemingly unrelated weight-loss treatments: the herbal supplement Motileaf and the pharmaceutical drug Naxipil. When patients, including a young man with bilateral kidney failure and a morbidly obese patient with sudden pulmonary hypertension, experience bizarre, organ damage, Lin traces the source to a sophisticate...
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