Remember TV doctor House’s mantra: Everybody lies? It’s something to keep in mind while reading Chris Pavone’s brisk, globe-trotting thriller, The Travelers (Crown, digital galley). Will Rhodes, a writer for classy magazine Travelers, is reporting on American expats when he’s lured into a honey trap by an Australian blonde calling herself Elle. Before he can say “I’m married,” Will finds himself involved in covert operations as a CIA asset. At least that’s what case officer Elle tells him. Meanwhile, readers are introduced to Will’s boss, secretive Malcolm Somers, who has a hidden office and unknown agenda that includes Will’s wife Chloe, whose cell phone keeps going to voicemail. Will dodges danger in Dublin, Paris, aboard a yacht in the Mediterranean, back home in Brooklyn, and on a lonely road in Iceland. The action is cinematic — twists, turns, lies, spies. As in his previous novels, The Expats and The Accident, Pavone proves himself an assured and entertaining tale-teller. Sure, The Travelers hurtles over the top, but who cares? Bring your parachute. And a lie detector.
Who is Tanya DuBois? That’s the question that runs throughout Lisa Lutz’s fast-paced The Passenger (Simon & Schuster, digital galley), an accomplished departure from her comic Spellman Files series. When introduced, Tanya’s husband Frank has just taken a header down the stairs, and Tanya figures the Wisconsin police will finger her for the crime. After all, it’s happened before. Huh?! Soon, Tanya’s called in a favor from the mysterious Mr. Oliver, who provides her with a new identity as Amelia, and she’s on the lam. In Austin, she falls in with a bartender called Blue, who is hiding from an abusive husband. Or so she says. When he comes looking for her, and two of Mr. Oliver’s henchman come after Amelia, the two women make a Strangers on a Train kind of pact, and Amelia becomes schoolteacher Debra in small-town Wyoming. But big trouble’s on her trail, and narrator Tanya/Amelia/Debra is again switching up IDs, dying her hair and hitting the road, this time to upstate New York. She lives off the grid, wondering when her luck is going to run out. Winter is coming. Lutz intersperses her resourceful heroine’s story with e-mails between someone named Jo and a man from her past, Ryan, which adds to the intrigue. I couldn’t put The Passenger down. What a ride.
A farmhouse in the upstate New York town of Chosen is the scene of crime and tragedy in Elizabeth Brundage’s chilly All Things Cease to Appear (Knopf Doubleday, digital galley). In 1978, failing dairy farmer Calvin Hale and wife Ella commit suicide in their upstairs bedroom, leaving three sons to grow up with relatives nearby. A local real estate agent –“purveyor of dreams and keeper of secrets” — later sells the picturesque farmhouse to college professor George Clare, his pretty wife Catherine and toddler daughter Franny. Catherine, unhappy in her marriage, senses the house is haunted, not realizing that her teenage handyman and babysitter Cole Hale used to live there. When George discovers Catherine brutally murdered in their bedroom, both he and Cole come under suspicion, as do others, but the crime remains unsolved for years. The real mystery here is not the killer’s identity, but how people react to circumstances, and how appearances deceive. Brundage, a precisely lyrical writer, knows her characters inside and out, including the psychopath at story’s center.
“Reader, I murdered him.” Yes, you read that right. This is not Jane Eyre who married him, but rather Jane Steele, the title heroine of Lyndsay Faye’s clever homage to the Bronte classic. Jane Steele (Penguin Putnam, digital galley) reads like a Victorian thriller as its plucky protagonist, a Jane Eyre fan, takes up her pen to recount her adventures. Orphaned as a young girl, Jane Steele is at the mercy of penny-pinching Aunt Patience and her loathsome son, who soon meets his fate at the bottom of a ravine. Jane is then shipped off to a Dickensian boarding school whose students are routinely starved by the tyrannical headmaster. Jane escapes to London, eventually learning that her aunt has died and that Highgate House — Jane’s rightful inheritance — is in the hands of Mr. Charles Thornfield, who is in need of a governess. Jane, of course, applies for the position. Faye, author of several historical thrillers, subverts Bronte’s plot enough to keep readers wondering what her self-professed serial killer will do next. Thornfield and his Sikh butler have secrets aplenty left over from the Anglo-Indian wars, but Jane fears her own “dark heart” and past misdeeds will thwart any romance or road to happiness. Hmmm. What would Jane Eyre do?
In The Girl in the Red Coat (Melville House, digital galley), British author Kate Hamer uses child abduction to write both a psychological thriller and a moving exploration of the bonds between mother and daughter. Single mom Beth has always had a premonition that she will lose her dreamy daughter, Carmel. Then one day at an outdoor festival, the eight-year-old wanders away in the fog and is rescued by an older man who claims to be her grandfather. Convinced that her mother has been in a bad accident, Carmel goes with the man to a secluded cottage where his female companion awaits with other children. Frantic Beth and the authorities mount a massive search, but Carmel is gone. Hamer alternates the perspectives between Beth and Carmel, both of whom struggle to hold on to their memories as the years go by. Taken to the United States by her fake grandparents, Carmel has a rag-tag childhood with the itinerant faith healers, while Beth keeps the faith back home even as her life changes. A far-fetched premise, perhaps — the American scenes are sketchy — but the pages practically turn themselves.
On a Clear Day I Can Read Forever 