In These Thrillers, Everyone Has Secrets. Big Ones.

Credit…Doeun Choi Thrillers Our columnist on three riveting new reads. Credit…Doeun Choi July 15, 2024 In McLean, Va., Stella Parker’s pampered suburban life is unraveling. “Funny how things come full circle,” her weird neighbor Gwen says to her in an inexplicable doorstep confrontation. What does that mean, exactly? Stella hopes that no one, especially her generally benign but often clueless husband, Tom — who, come to think of it, might be having an affair with Gwen — has figured out who she really is. “Stella tells herself that everyone has secrets,” Johanna Copeland writes in OUR KIND OF GAME (Harper, 291 pp., $30) , a rager of a psychological mystery about toxic men, murderous women and the art of constructing fake realities. The cover of “Our Kind of Game” is an illustration of two yellow apples in a bowl on a table. The key to some of Stella’s secrets can be found in flashbacks to 1987, when teenage sisters, Julie and Paula, are dealing with snobbish kids at school and unhinged adults at home. Their mother is a magnet for men, but as soon as her boyfriends start abusing her — and they always do — they are fated to “move on,” as she puts it. This is a euphemism. “Can you help me retell the past so we can protect our future?” she asks her daughters. Making these two stories converge in a coherent way is just one of the many high-wire tasks Copeland sets for herself in a novel as audacious as it is intricately plotted. Mostly she succeeds. If the men in the book aren’t as textured as their wives, girlfriends and daughters — and if poor Tom in the end might have to pay for the sins of others — well, this story belongs to its women. In THE EXPAT (Pegasus Crime, 236 pp., $27.95) , Hansen Shi’s taut novel of espionage and alienation, Michael Wang is a second-generation Chinese American caught between two cultures and comfortable in neither. After graduating from Princeton, he’s moved to San Francisco and taken a thankless job in the […]

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