Arriving just in time for summer, Rosecrans Baldwin’s new novel, The Last Kid Left, is set in a New England beach town, where the bucolic, sea-swept terrain is smote by a double murder allegedly committed by a teenager, whose girlfriend’s foray into digital, private pornography ends up going viral. Indeed, readers best beware that Baldwin’s dark and brooding narrative is by no means a light and breezy “beach read,” and on the contrary, requires an appreciation for a murder mystery/love story in which the plot is inhabited solely by a cast of antiheroes, both male and female, who are not always easy to love.

Inspired by a true 1930s crime in New England and imbued with vestiges of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter—one of Baldwin’s favorite works—The Last Kid Left begins when a car, driven by 19-year-old Nick Toussaint Jr., crashes into a kitschy sculpture of a cowgirl, prompting police to discover the teen has two bodies in the trunk: a prominent town doctor and his wife. Nick is charged with the murders, thrusting his already fragile 16-year-old girlfriend, Emily Portis, into a media maelstrom fueled by a hungry pack of journalists, one of whom realizes her reluctant return to her hometown of Claymore is entirely serendipitous. Meanwhile, a recently retired veteran police officer, the beleaguered recovering alcoholic Martin, finds himself drawn to the case at precisely the moment his toxic second marriage implodes. As Baldwin writes: “The clock reads four. In less than twenty-four hours the department will throw him a retirement party. Going by previous nights out, everyone will get drunk, sing his praises, wake up the next morning, and hop in a radio car and resume routine. Everyone except him.”

When Martin meets Nick’s mother, Suzanne, a fellow alcoholic who has not yet hopped aboard the recovery wagon, their shared obsession with proving the troubled teen’s innocence sparks a relationship that proves redemptive for both of them.

Without spoiling the ending of this finely wrought thriller, Baldwin’s novel steers clear of tidy endings, remaining faithful to delivering a story that ebbs and flows with the messiness of real life.

The Roanoke Girls lulled me into a false sense of security. The first chapters ably introduce Roanoke, a sprawling farmhouse in the middle of rural Kansas, and family black sheep Lane Roanoke, who returns to her family’s ancestral home years after a traumatic summer sent her running as fast as she could in the opposite direction. The disappearance of her cousin Allegra brings Lane back to her privileged grandparents and the summer fling she never quite got over, forcing her to deal with the dark things in her past while searching for her lost cousin. 

Based on those first few, perfectly capable pages, a reader may believe they know how The Roanoke Girls will end. But Engel drops a wicked twist in the first 35 pages—in the middle of a paragraph on the middle of the page—and lets it sit like a coiled snake. 

It’s a twist that most authors would save for the last chapter, and from that point on, The Roanoke Girls becomes a thrilling mystery and a satisfyingly gothic portrait of Middle America. But Engel is also interested in the things that break people and how they try to put themselves back together again. She deepens the typical tropes of the small-town mystery genre, using every sheltered country boy and fading matriarch to illustrate how people can silently, slowly shatter. 

Lane’s high school sweetheart is as damaged as she is, and the pair cleaves to each other with a jagged-edged desperation before tearing themselves instinctively away. It’s a painfully human, rough-hewn romance, and Engel balances it beautifully against Lane’s investigation into the fate of her cousin. Both threads braid together as the novel circles the mystery at its heart and The Roanoke Girls transforms into a dark fable of trauma and acceptance about damaged people accepting their crooked parts and using them to move forward.

This article was originally published in the March 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

No one who has read Dan Chaon’s fiction will be surprised to learn that Ill Will, his new novel, is relentlessly bleak. It’s a murder mystery and a literary thriller, a multilayered nonlinear narrative and a psychological portrait of the dark side of human nature. You’ll lose track of the number of deaths, but you’ll remember the daring storytelling and the skillful treatment of characters who live with repressed memories.

If you’re Dustin Tillman, a 41-year-old Cleveland psychologist, widower and father of two teenage sons, then you’ve got horrific memories to repress. When Dustin was 13, his parents and an aunt and uncle were murdered on the eve of a camping trip. A Pulitzer-nominated photograph of Dustin running from the scene with his twin cousins, Kate and Wave, became famous.

The murder was blamed on Dustin’s adopted older brother, Rusty, in part because of Dustin’s testimony; he claimed that Rusty had engaged in satanic rituals involving baby rabbits, a doll and a candlelit pentagram. Now, 27 years after the murder, DNA evidence exonerates Rusty, who has always proclaimed his innocence and contended that Dustin’s testimony was based on faulty recollection.

Rusty’s re-emergence is only one of the factors that complicate Dustin’s life. In addition to his wife’s death and his younger son’s growing heroin addiction, Dustin has a patient, a Cleveland police officer put on leave for a “psychological difficulty,” who recruits Dustin to help solve a series of murders of college-age men who have drowned on dates that follow a pattern. And the next date to fit the pattern is coming up.

Throughout Ill Will, Chaon plays with the novel form: second-person narration, emails, shifting perspectives, emojis and, most radically, parallel columns of prose that show concurrent thoughts and episodes in characters’ lives. The result could have been style for style’s sake, but, in Chaon’s capable hands, the novel is a brilliant depiction of mental illness. Not a pretty picture, but masterfully painted.

This article was originally published in the March 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Draco Incendia Trychophyton—also known as Dragonscale—is a deadly spore that causes people to spontaneously combust. Theories on its origin range from the melting ice caps to biological weaponry to a simple evolutionary turn. Elaborate—beautiful, even—black and gold tattoo-like markings identify those who are infected. Because there is often no warning before a person ignites and there is no cure, paranoia and hysteria spread like, well, wildfire. Eventually, cities burn and civil order dissolves, with ruthless and sinister Quarantine Patrols and Cremation Crews driving the infected into hiding. 

The titular character of Joe Hill’s fourth novel (following, most recently, NOS4A2), John Rookwood, is not an actual fireman, but a mysterious, charismatic Englishman. He wears a firefighter’s uniform because it not only hides his markings, but also allows him to be in the open without arousing suspicion. The heart of the book, though, is Harper Grayson, an elementary school nurse with compassion, gumption and an affinity for Mary Poppins. Harper is infected, frightened, alone and pregnant when John leads her to an underground community of infected folk who show her that it is possible to live in harmony with the spore. Soon, though, it becomes clear that safety does not always lie in numbers and that there is as much to fear inside the camp as outside.

With plenty of pop-culture references and playfully meta moments (like when characters discuss what they would do if they were in a movie or book), The Fireman is a bona fide, post-apocalyptic page-turner that’s equal parts touching and pulse-pounding, surprising and awe-inducing. The icing on the metaphorical cake? Easter eggs referencing his father Stephen King’s works—ranging from Hill’s use of “shine” as a verb of the supernatural variety to one character murderously swinging a shovel “like a croquet mallet”—pepper the book, delighting this fan of both writers.

This article was originally published in the May 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

At first, this reviewer wanted to warn readers not to be taken in by the light tone of Liane Moriarty’s The Husband’s Secret. On second thought, maybe readers should let this rather crafty novelist’s deceptive breeziness and humor sweep them along. It makes the shocks just that much more deliciously nasty, including the gob-smacking twist in the epilogue.

On the surface, the story is about a group of nice, middle-class, mostly Catholic women living in modern-day Australia. There’s Cecilia, the disconcertingly chipper and organized Tupperware salesperson with her mysterious, moody husband John-Paul and their beautiful young daughters. There’s Tess, who embarks on an affair of her own after she discovers her cousin Felicity is sleeping with her husband. And then there’s poor Rachel Crowley, whose daughter Janie was found dead in a park many years ago as a teenager. The case has never been solved, but Rachel’s sure she knows who killed Janie.

A constellation of spouses, children and co-workers surrounds these women, giving the proceedings a cozy normality that we know can’t last. Though men tend to be background figures, the most developed is Connor Whitby, the P.E. teacher at the school attended by Cecilia and Tess’ kids. Handsome and fit, Connor has everyone wondering why he remains unmarried well into his 40s.

Perhaps there’s a reason that most everyone in the book is Catholic, given its themes of sin, both venal and mortal, of guilt and redemption, forgiveness and confession—as well as its images of Easter eggs and hot cross buns and wrong­doings that erupt on Good Friday like the undead. The genius of The Husband’s Secret is that it makes us start to wonder what in our own lives would—or would not—have happened if, say, we had waited just five more minutes before we walked out the door, had not said that hurtful thing, had applied a bit of logic to that situation. The Husband’s Secret is as scary as it is familiar.