Are you looking for a book that you can't put down?  One that raises the hair on your arms and doesn't leave your mind for days? Or, are you just looking for a recommendation for your Adult Summer Reading guide? One of these may be for you!

 

Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith

Set in Stalinist Soviet Union, former war hero and current MGB agent Leo Demidov works long hours tracking down and arresting citizens suspected of political crimes.  Leo knows most of them are innocent, just as he knows he can easily be on the other side of the interrogation table.  Sent to investigate the death of a co-worker’s child, Leo is upset because he has more important work to do. His frustration levels grow when the child’s parents won’t stop insisting that their child has been murdered. In the Soviet Union in 1953 there is no crime, and certainly no murder.  Meanwhile, Leo’s jealous co-work plants seeds of doubt into their superior’s minds, and when Leo refuses to denounce his wife as a traitor, they both become targets of the State.  While on the run, Leo encounters more evidence that there is a serial killer on the loose-one that is targeting children and he is determined to put a stop to it.

This fast paced thriller will leave you on the edge of your seat. Several twists and tunrs only add to the suspense. Though the book deals with sensitive topics, they are not described in gorey detail.  Smith instead focuses on the fear the Soviet system instilled it it’s people.  Read it now before it hits the big screen this fall!

If you enjoyed Child 44, then read the series other two books- The Secret Speech and Agent 6.

 

The Kind Worth Killing by Peter Swanson

Ted Severson meets Lily Kitner in an airport bar on the way home from a business trip to London.  Still reeling from finding out about his wife’s infidelity, Ted jokes that he’d like to kill his wife.  To which Lily replies “ I would like to help.”  What starts as a modern retelling of Patricia Highsmith’s A Stranger on a Train takes a serious turn to the creepier.  Ted may have been wronged by his wife, but he ends up caught in a murderous game that began many years before in a small New England University.  Slowly, Lily’s own violent filled past is revealed and murder after murder occur.  Will you see the ending coming? Disturbing and suspenseful, Peter Swanson delivers a great psychological thriller.

 

Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon

Three strangers’ lives are interconnected in strange ways and through varying degrees of complicity in a criminal scheme in this literary thriller focusing on the fluidity of identity and the dark side of the internet.  In the midst of failing out of university, Ryan Schuler discovers that the man he knew as his uncle Jay is actually his biological father, while his parents are actually his aunt and uncle.  Ryan walks away from university, is presumed to have committed suicide and joins Jay in an intricate identity theft and money laundering scheme based out of a cabin in rural Michigan. Meanwhile, Lucy Lattimore, a recently orphaned high school student, has just run away from her small town in Ohio with her former history teacher, George Orson, to his parents’ house in Nebraska.  At the same time, timid Miles Cheshire embarks on yet another goose chase attempting to find his troubled identical twin brother, Hayden, and finds himself in the Northwest Territories in Canada piecing together Hayden’s disappearance. How are these disparate characters related? I won’t give away the connection, but this intricately plotted, psychological thriller will stay on your mind for days after finishing it.