Porch, patio and hammock season is underway! Here, some of our top picks from the darker side of fiction.

 

THE PARIS DIVERSION (Crown) by Chris Pavone

Following the bestselling The Expats, CIA agent Kate Moore is back and still living the expat life, but she’s left the disasters of Luxembourg behind for a new start in Paris’ storied Left Bank along with her husband and young children. When the city is threatened with a massive terror strike (with targets including the Louvre, the Élysée Palace and the Eiffel Tower among others), she discovers the attack is not at all what it seems – and worse, it has to do with her own family. Fans of Pavone’s earlier book The Travelers, will also appreciate the return appearance of this most unusual and mysterious travel company.

 

 

THE BETTER SISTER (Harper) by Alafair Burke

Talk about family dysfunction on steroids. In Burke’s latest twisty tale of domestic noir, a prominent Manhattan lawyer is murdered in his East Hampton beach house, provoking a most unlikely reunion: two very estranged sisters – one the dead man’s widow, the other his ex-wife – reluctantly unite when their son (and stepson) is accused of the murder.

 

 

 THE LAST(Atria) by Hannah Jameson

What if you glanced down at your phone and saw a news alert that the world was ending? That’s what happens in this dystopian psychological thriller about an American academic stranded at the secluded L’Hotel Sixieme in Switzerland as the world descends into nuclear war: Washington, DC has been hit with a bomb, then New York, then London, and finally Berlin. And that, as it turns out, is just the beginning. Once news outlets and social media go black (even as the sky turns orange), there’s no way to know how many of the world’s cities have been hit and if family members are alive or dead.  During the struggle for the survival – and sanity-  of the hotel’s remaining inhabitants, and with the gruesome discovery of a unknown child’s body in the building, it becomes apparent one of them may be a dangerous killer.

 

THE SENTENCE IS DEATH (Harper Collins) by Anthony Horowitz

In the sequel to bestselling The Word Is Murder, eccentric detective Daniel Hawthorne, and his sidekick, the author Anthony take on the case of a celebrity divorce lawyer who was found bludgeoned to death with a tres expensive bottle of 1982 Chateau Lafite. Horowitz, one of the UK’s most prolific writers, is also the creator of television’s massively popular Midsomer Murders, Foye’s War and Poirot. 

 

 

I’LL NEVER TELL(Simon & Schuster) by Catherine McKenzie

For many of us, memories of summer camp bring forth nostalgic images of campfires, cold, clear lakes and a lingering smell of rain intermingled with woodsmoke. Ah, the freedom of it, the good old days. But for the five siblings in McKenzie’s new book, their childhood summer camp is the setting for a terrible accident involving a fellow camper, a tragedy they’ve all tried to bury deep in the past. But after the sudden death of their parents, a condition of their father’s will forces them to face what happened all those years ago and uncover the secrets and lies that could tear the family apart.

Available June 4, 2019

 

BIG SKY: A JACKSON BRODIE NOVEL (Random House) by Kate Atkinson

In the latest of the series featuring iconoclastic detective Jackson Brodie (Case Histories, One Good Turn), the former soldier and policeman has relocated to a quiet seaside village in North Yorkshire with his teenage son and aging Labrador named Dido. While investigating yet another unfaithful husband for yet another suspicious wife, he stumbles into a sinister network that leads him back into his old life with its dark lies and secrets.

Available June 18, 2019

 

CONNECTIONS IN DEATH (Little, Brown) by J.D. Robb (Nora Roberts)

Everyone’s fave futuristic cop is back in this installment of J.D. Robb’s sexy police procedural series set in the mid-21st century New York. As the title suggests, death hits close to home for Lieutenant Eve Dallas and her beyond perfect billionaire husband Roarke when the brother of one of Roarke’s employees appears to have died of an accidental drug overdose –  but in fact, his death is just the beginning of something far more sinister.

RELATED:

Fiction Books with Buzz: 8 Recommended Reads

Books With Buzz: Must-Read Historical Fiction