For twenty years, Celia Scott has watched her husband, Arthur, hide from the secrets surrounding his sister Eve's death. As a young man, Arthur fled his small Kansas hometown, moved to Detroit, married Celia, and never looked back. But when the 1967 riots frighten him even more than his past, he convinces Celia to pack up their family and return to the road he grew up on, Bent Road, and that same small town where Eve mysteriously died.

Set against the Taiwanese criminal underworld, "The Foreigner "is Francie Lin's audacious debut novel. A noirish tale about family, fraternity, conscience, and the curious gulf between a man's culture and his deepest self
Emerson Chang is a mild mannered bachelor on the cusp of forty, a financial analyst in a neatly pressed suit, a child of Taiwanese immigrants who doesn't speak a word of Chinese, and, well, a virgin. His only real family is his mother, whose subtle manipulations have kept him close--all in the name of preserving an obscure idea of family and culture.

The last Mo Hayder book I reviewed, 2005's The Devil of Nanking, was my Mystery of the Month then, competing with books by Randy Wayne White, James O. Born and George Pelecanos. I'm pleased to say Hayder goes two-for-two (at least in my book) with her latest, Gone, which finds perennial hero Jack Caffery on the trail of a carjacker who targets vehicles containing preteen girls. Caffery is not exactly hot on the trail, however, as each lead turns into a dud, with the carjacker/kidnapper out-thinking the cops at every turn. In the meantime, Caffery's colleague Phoebe "Flea" Marley works on a parallel theory, one that leads her into an abandoned tunnel where repeated cave-ins have created eerie subterranean rooms, ideal for the storage of the kidnapper's paraphernalia--and perhaps the bodies of the victims. Each investigation will bear fruit, but in ways unexpected by both the protagonists and the reader. And then, just as Gone barrels full-steam toward what seems to be the denouement--bang!--there is another kidnapping, and everything the cops held as true goes flying right out the window. Hayder writes some of the most carefully plotted, gripping and downright scary books in the mystery genre, and Gone continues that tradition in fine form.

Dobson, New York, 1905.
Detective Simon Ziele lost his fiancee in the General Slocum ferry disaster--a thousand perished on that summer day in 1904 when an onboard fire burned the boat down in the waters of the East River. Still reeling from the tragedy, Ziele transferred to a police department north of New York, to escape the city and all the memories it conjured.

"I was the Miracle Boy, once upon a time. Later on, the Milford Mute. The Golden Boy. The Young Ghost. The Kid. The Boxman. The Lock Artist. That was all me.""But you can call me Mike." Marked by tragedy, traumatized at the age of eight, Michael, now eighteen, is no ordinary young man. Besides not uttering a single word in ten years, he discovers the one thing he can somehow do better than anyone else. Whether it's a locked door without a key, a padlock with no combination, or even an eight-hundred pound safe ... he can open them all. It's an unforgivable talent. A talent that will make young Michael a hot commodity with the wrong people and, whether he likes it or not, push him ever close to a life of crime. Until he finally sees his chance to escape, and with one desperate gamble risks everything to come back home to the only person he ever loved, and to unlock the secret that has kept him silent for so long.

Inspector John Rebus has done it again. A few days into a murder inquiry following the brutal death of an Edinburgh art dealer, Rebus blows up at his superior, DCS Gill Templer, and is sent into exile: the remote Scottish Police College, where Rebus must undergo "retraining." And he is not alone. At the college, he joins a group of cops equally troubled by authority-the so-called Resurrection Men, granted one last chance to redeem themselves and save their careers. To learn the merits of teamwork, they're supposed to investigate a long-unsolved case.