Don’t wait another day to read Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (Knopf, review copy), Gabrielle Zevin’s immersive new novel about friendship, creativity — and video games. But don’t let the latter put you off. You don’t have to have died of dysentery on the Oregon Trail, or survived a zombie apocalypse, to appreciate this multi-leveled chronicle of two California kids, Sam and Sadie, who bond while playing Super Mario in a children’s hospital. A misunderstanding interrupts their early friendship, but they reconnect as college students in the ‘90s — Sam at Harvard, Sadie at MIT — and the question “Do you still game?” leads to a partnership designing video games. The collaboration, although wildly successful, is also fraught by misunderstandings, jealousy and perceived betrayals. Egos collide, other people — Sadie’s manipulative professor Dov, Sam’s supportive roommate Marx — play significant roles. I’m a reader, not a gamer, but good books and games both depend on content and storytelling. Zevin, who also wrote book-club favorite The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry, knows how to tell a story. Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow is both playful and serious, compulsively readable. Your turn…
Spying is often called the Great Game, and for a long time Berlin was a major playground. But in the winter of 1990, the wall has fallen and the rules are changing for the agents of Winter Work (Knopf, digital galley). Author Dan Fesperman is on familiar territory, though, as he crafts another intricate thriller, this one inspired by a true incident — the CIA’s fabled acquisition of important Stasi files with informers’ names. Stasi colonel Emil Grimm hopes to trade the information for safe passage to the West for himself, his terminally ill wife and her caretaker. The Russians want the data for leverage and money, and they will kill to get their hands on it. The CIA is buying from whoever offers the best deal, and agent Claire Sailor is savvy enough to know her boss is keeping her in the dark even as she plays cat and mouse with enigmatic Grimm and the Russian henchmen. Sailor, who last appeared in The Cover Wife, gets some help from an old colleague who misses the game, but she’s not sure she can trust a new partner. Snow and secrets are so thick on the ground you might not spy the Easter eggs from Fesperman’s previous novels. Look out for a certain Paris snow globe.
Beginning with the excellent The Expats 10 years ago, Chris Pavone has proved he can do the twist with aplomb. He adds a couple of moves in Two Nights in Lisbon (FSG, digital galley), but I know when I’m being played. I don’t mind because I’m having too much fun. Ariel Pryce wakes up in Lisbon hotel room to discover her handsome, younger husband, John Wright, has disappeared. The police and American Embassy officials aren’t much interested that the financier has gone missing for a few hours, although they are surprised how little Ariel knows about her husband of three months. Still, they reassure her he’ll turn up. He doesn’t, but a ransom note does. Game on. Pavone neatly shifts between present and past to reveal his characters’ back stories and secrets. Most recently a bookseller in a small town with a young son, Ariel was once an actress and fled a bad marriage. She’s had several names. Surprise — John has, too. Pavone weaves international intrigue with domestic suspense and brings back a villain from a previous book, all the while building to an improbable yet satisfying ending.
“Fictional murder is oddly soothing in troubled times.” So thinks forensic archaeologist Ruth Galloway at one point in Elly Griffiths’ The Locked Room (HarperCollins, digital galley), set during the early days of the pandemic in England’s Norfolk region. Ruth is hoping her brother has sent her a crime novel to read during lockdown, maybe something by Val McDermid or Ian Rankin. Ruth has excellent taste! Crime fiction is my go-to genre, and I’ve been reading scads of good ones this summer, including The Locked Room. Since it’s the 14th (and apparently penultimate) book in the series, it’s not recommended for newcomers who are likely to find the relationships among the characters as confusing as its puzzle of a plot. Covid lockdown complicates everything, from Ruth and her students unearthing a possible plague skeleton, to Nelson and his fellow police officers investigating a series of murders disguised as suicides. And someone has been locked in a lonely cellar. In Lauren Belfer’s absorbing Ashton Hall (Ballantine, digital galley), there’s a secret room in an English manor house — and there’s a skeleton walled inside. The discovery by a curious, autistic boy sparks his mother, a frustrated academic, to research the house’s history going back to the Elizabethan era.
Fiona Barton, Megan Miranda and Ruth Ware are reliable authors for summer suspense. In Barton’s Local Gone Missing (Berkley Penguin, digital galley), a police detective on medical leave gets involved in a small seaside town’s local politics when two teens overdose at a music festival and a senior gadfly goes missing. People are always disappearing in Miranda’s twisty thrillers, and in The Last to Vanish (Scribner, digital galley), the mountain resort town of Cutter’s Pass has a long history of visitors going missing. Now, when a journalist investigating the disappearances also vanishes, his younger brother and the likeable manager of a local inn pick up the trail. Ruth Ware’s The It Girl (Gallery/Scout Press, digital gallery) toggles between the Oxford University of a decade ago and present-day Edinburgh. Back in the day, charismatic April was Hannah’s roommate and the center of a tight group of friends. Then she was murdered, and Hannah’s testimony put the killer behind bars. Ten years later, pregnant Hannah is married to April’s boyfriend Will when the killer dies in prison and a journalist suggests he was wrongly convicted. The Big Chill atmosphere and academic mystery seemed overly familiar to me, but I still kept turning pages.
Injured in a fall, successful novelist Gerry Andersen is confined to a hospital bed in his new Baltimore penthouse, dependent on his colorless assistant and a stodgy night nurse. His drug-addled mind roams through his past and present like Marley’s ghost, but he is certain the woman calling on the phone at night saying she’s Aubrey is not Aubrey. Impossible. Aubrey is the main character in his best-selling novel “Dream Girl.” She’s fictional. Gerry made her up. She doesn’t exist. Or does she?
I detested Alex Michaelides’ second novel The Maidens (Celadon, purchased hardcover). Let me count the ways: poor writing, uneven pacing, unbelievable characters, absurd plot, ludicrous ending. I did like the setting — Cambridge University with its historic, shadowed halls of academe. But the story of a widowed psychotherapist convinced that a classics professor is killing his female students is a slog from slow beginning to ridiculous conclusion, a true disappointment for those who liked Michaelides’ The Silent Witness. Sorry I wasted the time and money, bamboozled by the hype and comparisons to Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. If you want to read something else on the best-seller list (keeping in mind that “best” refers only to sales), try Laura Dave’s The Last Thing He Told Me (Simon & Schuster, digital galley), in which a woman’s husband disappears in the midst of a corporate scandal, and she and her teenage stepdaughter go looking for him. It’s a quick, suspenseful riff on the old “you never know really know somebody” plot. 
Thank goodness for Elly Griffiths and Laurie R. King. Neither writer misses a beat in the latest entries in their long-running detective series. In Griffith’s The Night Hawks (Houghton Mifflin, digital galley), forensic archaeologist Ruth Galloway and her new colleague David Brown are called to a crime scene when metal detectorists discover Bronze Age artifacts, a new corpse and a skeleton on a Norfolk beach. Soon after, these same “Night Hawks” are at the scene of a presumed murder/suicide at an isolated farmhouse, and then one of their own turns up dead. DCI Harry Nelson, the father of Ruth’s 10-year-old daughter, doesn’t like coincidences, and he’s also suspicious of Ruth’s new colleague, who is a first-class meddler. The bits of history and folklore (there’s a gigantic hound) are fascinating, as is the mystery itself and the continuing relationship between Ruth and Nelson. History, mystery and myth also play into King’s lively Castle Shade (Bantam/Random House, digital galley), with Mary Russell and husband Sherlock Holmes helping Marie of Roumania — yes, the real Queen — figure out who is threatening her teenage daughter. Marie is ensconced in her beloved Castle Bran in the Carpathian mountains of Transylvania, once home to Vlad the Impaler. There are whispers of witchcraft and rumors of vampires among the villagers and castle servants, although Holmes’ brother Mycroft suspects Marie’s diplomatic enemies of trying to undermine her popularity. Russell and Holmes think someone inside or close to the castle wants Marie out of the way. King makes the most of the shivery atmosphere as her wily and witty detectives stalk things that go bump in the night.
Having wrapped up the infamous Ellingham cold case in the “Truly Devious” trilogy, teen detective Stevie Bell returns in Maureen Johnson’s nifty The Box in The Woods (HarperCollins, digital galley). The new owner of Camp Wonder Falls offers Stevie and her Ellingham friends Janelle and Nate jobs as counselors in return for Stevie’s help with a podcast investigating the 1978 Box in the Woods murders. Back then at what was Camp Sunny Pines, four counselors were killed and three of their bodies hidden in an old hunting blind. Johnson has a blast moving the story back and forth between past and present, and using every summer camp trope from from familiar books and horror movies. You practically expect Jason to jump out from behind a tree. It’s also fun seeing the friends trying to fit in at camp — engineer Janelle proves to be super at crafts, while Nate, who wrote a best-selling fantasy novel at 14, is plagued by a critical camper, and Stevie discovers previously unknown outdoor skills. It helps that boyfriend David is camping at a nearby lake and knows the way her mind works — and her anxiety grows — when confronted with a puzzle. The Box in the Woods may be even better than its predecessors, The Hand on the Wall, etc., because the various mysteries are satisfactorily resolved by book’s end. But one remains — what will Stevie Bell do next?
On a Clear Day I Can Read Forever 