Bruce Tierney

There are shades of Jeffery Deaver’s Lincoln Rhyme in quadriplegic forensics consultant Lucas Page, protagonist of Robert Pobi’s standout thriller City of Windows. Page is not quite as physically challenged as Rhyme, but as a result of a shooting some 10 years ago, he is burdened with the loss of an arm and a leg, as well as the loss of sight in one eye. Once a crack FBI field agent, Page has retreated into an academic life. And then something rattles his peaceful post-FBI existence: the assassination of his former partner by a sniper’s bullet, a seemingly impossible shot fired from a rooftop during a blinding snowstorm. Page reluctantly agrees to come out of retirement to help with the investigation of the shooting. His almost three-dimensional grasp of velocities and trajectories borders on the uncanny, and he is thus uniquely suited to the task at hand. Unfortunately, the shooting is only the first in a series of virtually impossible sniper shots targeting a member of the law enforcement community. The tension ratchets up for the reader just as it does for Page as he and his loved ones find themselves in the crosshairs. Pobi has written five other books, but this is his first thriller. It would seem he has found his calling.

I cannot think of a mystery protagonist who harbors more secrets or confronts more ethical challenges than Detective Catrina “Cat” Kinsella. In her first adventure, Sweet Little Lies, Cat investigated a case in which her father figured prominently and perhaps not entirely innocently. Cat knows the whole story now, but she has been remarkably stingy about sharing the details with anyone, least of all her superiors at the London Metropolitan Police. In Caz Frear’s sequel, Stone Cold Heart, the parallels to Cat’s previous case are unmistakable: a charismatic yet somehow sinister suspect; a pair of killings years apart with similarities worth noting; and a cast comprised of members of an extraordinarily dysfunctional family, each with ample reason to shift blame onto the unlikable suspect. As Cat delves into the investigation, she begins to believe that the suspect may be the victim of an elaborate frame. On the other hand, said suspect is a seriously bad guy (even if not a murderer), so why should she exercise extreme measures to release this predator into the wild again? You will guess who did it, but you will be wrong.

“Do not use the word gripping,” I admonish myself when writing this column each month. This is not a directive I arrived at easily, having already (ab)used that word 12,587 times before, give or take. I’m going to bring it out of retirement this month, however, for Aoife Clifford’s Second Sight, which is indeed—wait for it—gripping. Lawyer Eliza Carmody represents what the townspeople of Kinsale, Australia, consider to be the wrong side of a class-action suit against an electric company they deem responsible for starting a fatal bushfire. Complicating matters, Eliza is a Kinsale hometown girl, thus fully rendering her persona non grata with a broad swath of the population. When the police unearth a cache of human bones near a historic homestead called the Castle, Eliza cannot help but remember the disappearance of her best friend, still unsolved, shortly after a party at the Castle more than two decades ago. Now is as good a time as any to relaunch the investigation. Second Sight is a thematically rich study in fragile memories and outright duplicity. And yes, it is utterly gripping.

Calcutta has been much less safe for murderers and brigands since Captain Sam Wyndham and his Indian assistant, Surrender-Not Banerjee, hit the crime-solving scene, first in A Rising Man, then followed up by 2018’s A Necessary Evil. They return this month in Abir Mukherjee’s riveting novel of the investigation of a serial killer, Smoke and Ashes. Having returned from the Great War, Wyndham takes on the role of captain in the British Imperial Police, finding it essential to keep secret one major aspect of his life. In the aftermath of the war, he has developed a rather severe opium addiction. An opium den is no proper place for a policeman, of course, so when Wyndham is present at a den that gets subjected to a raid, he beats a hasty retreat. In doing so, he comes upon the brutalized body of a Chinese man, a man who clearly suffered grievously before being put to death. Murder piles upon murder, and Wyndham must walk the fine line between investigating the crime without exposing himself as an addict. Mukherjee has a substantive grasp of colonial Indian history, and his books have the feel of a modern-day and much more progressive Kipling, full of high intrigue and derring-do, yet overlaid with the day-to-day reality of a struggle with addiction.