August continues what’s been an incredibly strong summer of new thrillers, with the latest books from C.J. Box, Robert Crais, Preston & Child, Ward Larsen, Stephen Coonts, Alex Segura, and Rob Hart’s The Warehouse, which might just be the book of the year.
Best of all for readers, September is stacked too, so while cooler temperatures are finally on the horizon, this wild ride of hot new releases isn’t going to stop anytime soon.
Happy reading!
A Dangerous Man by Robert Crais
Release Date: August 6 (Putnam)
It all started with going to the bank. That’s all Joe Pike intended to do, make a deposit and move on with his life, same as anyone else. Instead, upon returning to his Jeep, Joe sees the friendly bank teller, a woman named Isabel Roland, exit the building—her pink shirt catching his eye—and throw on a pair of shades. Things take a turn, though, when Isabel is approached by a large man and then shortly thereafter leaves in an SUV with him. Her body language, Joe notes, isn’t right, and he realizes she was taken against her will.
Having witnessed the kidnapping in real-time, Joe springs to action, using his lethal set of skills—all of which have been honed over a lifetime that includes stops in the Marines and the LA police department—to save the woman before things get out of hand.
Sadly, the victory is short-lived, as Isabel is later abducted again, this time before Joe can do anything about it, forcing him to turn to his longtime friend and sometimes co-worker Elvis Cole for help. But as the two begin to investigate, they find themselves left with more questions than answers—and as dead bodies begin to pile up around them, it becomes clear that whatever Joe stepped into that day at the bank is worse than either could have predicted . . . and the only way to put the mess behind them is to shoot their way out once and for all.
Much like his past books The Watchman and The First Rule, Crais makes Joe Pike the lead here, changing things up a bit in a way that feels both oddly refreshing and pleasantly familiar. Readers still hear from Elvis Cole, as Crais alternates telling the story through his and Pike’s POV, along with a few others (including the bad guys), carefully layering his plot in a way that sucks readers in early and demands their attention throughout. The pacing is steady, opening with a bit of action before pulling back ever so slightly to let the story unfold. Once it does, Crais doesn’t let up, and while readers might have guessed how past books in the series would end before they got there, this one should keep even veteran readers on the edge of the seats until the last page.
Robert Crais remains one of the most consistent and talented writers in the genre, and this is one of his better books in years . . . which is really saying something when you look at his body of work.
The Bitterroots by C.J. Box
Release Date: August 13th (Minotaur)
Following the events of Paradise Valley (2017), former police officer Cassie Dewell has left North Dakota in the review mirror and set up shop in Bozeman, Montana. Now working as a private detective, Cassie struggles to find work as she embraces her newfound career—forcing her to take whatever business she can find, most of which comes from one of her dear friends, attorney Rachel Mitchell.
Following an exhausting stakeout in Big Timber, Cassie wants nothing more than to dial it back and spend time her son, Ben, now a teenager, when Mitchell calls with a new job. One of her clients, Blake Kleinsasser, stands accused of raping his fifteen-year-old niece, Franny Porché, and the lawyer wants Cassie to look into the claims and follow the evidence wherever it may lead—even if it ultimately leads to a guilty verdict, which is important to Cassie, who has spent the bulk of her adult life trying to put bad men behind bars and has zero interest in switching sides and helping them walk free.
Reluctantly, Cassie takes the job and quickly learns that the bulk of the evidence—including DNA and a sworn statement from Franny—doesn’t look good for Blake. On top of that is Blake’s own admission that he was so drunk on the night in question, that the rancher has no idea what he did or didn’t do. Still, being the thorough investigator that she is, Cassie begins speaking with a number of locals, members of Blake’s family, and Lochsa County Sheriff Ben Wagy. What she finds is a web full of deceit and corruption waiting for her at every turn.
The Kleinsasser family, she realizes, has considerably more power than she could have guessed, and the more Cassie looks into Blake’s family—including his siblings John Wayne, Rand, and Franny’s mother, Cheyenne—the more dangerous things become for her . . .
From the moment she was first introduced to readers in The Highway (2013), Cassie Dewell has been a fan favorite, and Box has developed her brilliantly over the course of four novels, turning her into one of the best female protagonists the genre has to offer. While there are some similarities between Cassie and Joe Pickett—Box’s Wyoming game warden and star of his #1 New York Times bestselling series—mainly their work ethics and willingness to see a job through to the very end no matter where it leads, Dewell is unique, and her personality is much different than Joe’s. The same too can be said about the feel of the two series in general, with Dewell’s books a tad darker and grittier, while also featuring some of the most terrifying villains Box has ever created.
Expertly plotted and filled with nonstop suspense, The Bitterroots is another must-read from C.J. Box, and a one of the hottest crime thrillers hitting store shelves this year.
The Russian Account by Stephen Coonts
Release Date: August 13th (Regnery Fiction)
Both Tommy Carmellini and Jake Grafton return in the latest politically-charged thriller from New York Times bestselling author Stephen Coonts.
It all starts when a prominent politician informs CIA Director Jake Grafton that the daughter of a good friend in Estonia has been kidnapped. But what starts as a rescue mission quickly becomes more when Grafton realizes that the parent involved works at a small bank that’s already being looked at for suspicious activity.
The branch in question, it turns out, has been processing a few hundred million American dollars a week, money Grafton strongly suspects traces back to Russia and even Vladimir Putin himself. To find out for sure, he tasks veteran operative Tommy Carmellini with investigating things—specifically where the money comes from and where it’s going—and to locate and save the girl.
As the story unfolds, Carmellini finds that the money does, indeed, come from Russia and then to countries all over the world, the majority of it ending up in American accounts—most of which are registered to various political campaigns. The motives are simple, to destabilize the West and increase Russian influence, but the deeper Carmellini and Grafton dig, the more twists and turns they discover—including a shocking revelation that unmasks the individual who originally came up with the scheme in the first place, someone most readers will never see coming.
After years spent fighting on the front lines against the war on terror, confronting the enemy head-on, Tommy Carmellini suddenly finds himself out of his element while chasing down the mastermind behind a financial conspiracy that threatens the United States and Europe . . . and Coonts’ ending will leave some readers rattled.
Ever since leaving his longtime publisher and signing with Regnery several years back, Coonts has taken a new approach to his writing. Always known as a conservative, Coonts’ stories tended to lean to the right of the political spectrum—similar to fellow bestselling authors Vince Flynn, Brad Thor, and to a lesser extent, Tom Clancy. Now, though, Coonts has ripped the filter off completely and continues to serve up politically incorrect thrillers that tackle the most controversial hot-button issues facing American today.
It doesn’t take much to realize the similarities, either, when you write in a president with an abnormal hairstyle who lost the popular vote and now faces impeachment, an angry democratic speaker, or a senator who claims to be Native American, and so on. The difference now is that Coonts isn’t trying to hide anything—and his unvarnished, unapologetic style is helplessly entertaining, making The Russian Account his third must-read thriller in a row. Only whereas Liberty’s Last Stand and The Armageddon File were both crammed with action, Coon’s dials back the explosions here. There’s still plenty—including an assassination attempt—to get readers’ heartrates revved up, but the bulk of the story’s 300-something pages are spent on the financial side, explaining things and teasing the fallout. Coonts still does a nice job of keeping the pacing steady, but fans of his series may notice this one’s a bit slower than they’re used to.
Miami Midnight by Alex Segura
Release Date: August 13th (Polis Books)
Physical and mental stress have left private investigator Pete Fernandez exhausted, overwhelmed, and dead. At lease clinically speaking, anyhow, as Pete’s heart stopped beating after enduring the carnage that Segura’s last book, Blackout, ended with.
Here, a full year later, he’s a broken man in every sense of the word. Physical therapy helps some, but his battered body—which doctors stitched back together as best they could—is scarred and tired. Worse even are the mental scars, which Pete is dealing with by talking to a therapist. Together, the treatment plans help him live some semblance of a regular life, a life that now includes running a small Miami-based independent bookstore instead of cracking cases full-time.
Of course, that all changes when an old Cuban mobster seeks his help and asks him to investigate the death of his son, a skilled musician, and locate his daughter-in-law who has gone missing. Allowing himself to be pulled back into the game one last time, Pete and his partner Kathy Bentley—who recently became engaged to someone not named Pete, much to his dismay—begin scouring the Miami nightlife for clues as to what really happened.
What they find, though, is bigger than they anything else they’ve faced, as the duo is quickly pulled into a world of lies, conspiracies, and cold-blooded killers.
Alex Segura, who’s long been one of the more underrated crime novelists working today, brings the Miami setting to life in the same way that James Lee Burke has made a career out of capturing the ambiance of Lousiana, or how C.J. Box’s deep knowledge of Wyoming often makes the setting itself a character within the story. With this one, readers will find themselves under the lights of Miami’s club scene, and Segura uses plenty of descriptions to make things pop visually, adding that extra something to the story. Moreover, the setting fits Segura’s gritty style perfectly, and while there are a lot of plotlines playing out at the same time, he manages to keep things simple enough that they aren’t hard to follow. More impressive is how he ties everything up, closing arcs from past books while delivering solid twists for good measure.
All in all, Alex Segura’s name should be firmly in the mix when discussing the best crime thriller novelists working today, and Miami Midnight is his strongest book to date.
Assassins Revenge by Ward Larsen
Release Date: August 20th (Forge Books)
Ex-Mossad agent David Slaton just wants to live a quiet, peaceful life. Instead, that proves impossible, though not for a lack of trying. Multiple times now, former colleagues, friends, and even some foes have strong-armed the former assassin to shake off retirement, pick up his gun, and return to action.
This time around, it’s Slaton’s worst-case scenario that draws him back into the fold when he returns back to the Gibraltar marina where he’d docked Sirius, his live-in sailboat, and finds it missing. Eventually, he locates it floating more than a mile from shore, but his wife and son aren’t onboard—a revelation that stirs a bit of panic inside the usually calm and collected operator. His fears of foul play are quickly confirmed when he receives a message instructing him to take out a target if he ever wants to see his family again.
For Slaton, it all makes sense, at least from a job perspective. State assassinations are a touchy business, and who better to hire than a former killer who is believed to be dead by most everyone—and who knows a thing or two about slipping off the grid and keeping his mouth shut—to have pull the trigger? Plus, given he’s a man with no country or anything tying him down, apart from his family, he’s not only especially lethal, he’s also expendable. Except that, for Slaton, things aren’t that cut and dry. Preferring to stay alive and live out whatever time he has left with his family, he’s determined to do whatever it takes to get them back.
His target is a man named Paul Mordechai, a former special assistant to Israeli’s minister of energy who then went to work for the Mossad. There, he fell out of favor with his bosses after attempting to highlight cyber weaknesses within Israel’s vaunted foreign intelligence service by first exposing them through rather controversial means. Following his fall from good standing, Mordechai was subsequently transferred to the International Atomic Energy Agency.
But as David soon learns, Mordechai ended up uncovering another conspiracy—one that suggests the North Korean government may be working with top ISIS officials to help the terror group reclaim their fame by striking a mighty blow to the West. And just like that, Slaton finds himself smack-dab in the middle of another international crisis where the stakes—both professionally and personally—couldn’t possibly be any higher . . .
Ward Larsen is a fine writer who knows a thing or two about pacing, always structuring his stuff in a way that pulls readers onward, while never presenting a dull moment to comfortably set the book down and walk away. The one area readers may soon feel fatigued, though, is the constant need to find ways to pull the hero back into the life he wants to leave behind. Daniel Silva, who by all accounts is the gold standard and maybe the best spy novelist alive not named John le Carré faced a similar problem years back when his protagonist, Gabriel Allon, also found himself unsuccessfully trying to leave the Mossad behind. After several books of that, it’s easy to lose interest in the hero who no longer wants to save the day—and while Silva found a creative solution for his franchise, that may be the number one issue Larsen faces with David Slaton moving forward.
All that said, the setup works for this book, and Larsen utilizes a solid twist to freshen things up before settling in and delivering another heart-pumping thriller that’s on par with A.J. Tata, Sean Parnell, and Stephen Coonts.
Old Bones by Preston & Child
Release Date: August 20th (Grand Central Publishing)
In her first starring role, Nora Kelly, a young, beautiful curator at Santa Fe Institute of Archaeology who has already tasted success on several previous excavations, is approached by a handsome historian named Clive Benton, who offers her the opportunity of a lifetime.
Back in the mid-1800s, travelers migrating west became trapped in the Sierra Nevada mountain range during a hazardous snowstorm that left the group, forever remembered throughout history as the Donner Party, desperate to stay alive. So desperate, in fact, that many turned to such extreme acts as cannibalism in hopes of cheating death. Now, Benton claims to have the original journal of Tamzene Donner, which may leave clues as to the camp’s position—which is where Nora comes in. Benton asks for her help finding the exact location, ticking off a number of reasons, including the powerful impact finding the site would have in today’s world.
Of course, there’s also rumors of gold, potentially tens of millions of dollars’ worth, which doesn’t really interest Nora, who’s more in it for the historical ramifications than the money. She takes the job, and soon a team heads out in search of the buried pioneers’ remains—only to learn they aren’t the only ones combing through the area. Worse yet, the more digging they do, the more they realize that something else might be buried right along with the old bones they’re searching for as a dark secret emerges, indicating that we don’t really know what went on in that camp over one hundred and seventy years ago . . . and begging the question, are we perhaps better off not knowing?
Preston and Child are both veteran, solid-as-a-rock novelists who know how to spin a good mystery and keep readers entertained. Nora Kelly, who has stolen scenes in their Pendergast series in years past, is a terrific leading character, and the writers have done a fine job developing her. Same goes for Corinne Swanson, an FBI agent Nora ends up teaming with, and together they drive the story—which twists and turns its way to a fun and somewhat shocking conclusion. Think Christopher Golden’s Ararat (2017) meets Alma Katsu’s The Hunger (2018), with a pinch of Bill Schutt and J.R. Finch’s Himalayan Codex (2017) . . . and a drop of Indiana Jones.
Preston and Child add another top-notch protagonist to their arsenal in Nora Kelly, and Old Bones is as good as anything they’ve written over the last decade.
The Warehouse by Rob Hart
Release Date: August 20th (Crown)
Stepping away from his Ash McKenna series (Potter’s Field, 2018. etc.), Hart opens his latest thriller by introducing readers to billionaire Gibson Wells, founder of Cloud—an Amazon-like company that’s dominated the market and put mom and pop shops out to pasture while turning ridiculous profits and becoming the largest company in the world. Wells, who is dying from pancreatic cancer, offers up his take on his company and what it took to build Cloud into the empire that it is. (Spoiler alert: he’s drank a bit too much of his own Kool-Aid and fails to see the error of his ways, while truly believing he’s done nothing but make the world a better place.)
Also dying is the way consumers obtain their desired products and services. Retail stores and strip malls are nearly a thing of the past, and to meet the increased demand of online shopping, most of which is done on Cloud—and hey, why not when you can get your packages brought to you that same day, courtesy of the company’s fleet of delivery drones—Wells has assembled what he calls “MotherCloud facilities,” where employees can live and work.
Here, at one of those facilities, we meet our two co-protagonists, Paxton—an ex-prison guard turned entrepreneur who saw his own business throttled by Cloud and ends up working for the retail conglomerate as a security guard—and Zinnia, a shipping employee who’s actually a secret agent embedded into Cloud, who lives at the same company facility. Told through alternating POVs, readers follow Paxton and Zinnia through their daily routines as they acclimate to their new home, then begin to fall for one another. All the while, Hart presents a number of alarming issues that we, whether we realize it or not, must face before it’s too late and the consequences finally catch up with us as a society.
Like, for example, what might happen if a company becomes more powerful than, say, a country? Or what to do when work and life and no longer separate things, but instead it’s all one blurred reality?
Alarming as it is, at its core, The Warehouse is more than just a cautionary tale, it’s a thriller, and when you toss in the heart-pounding corporate espionage elements and the nightmarish situation both characters quickly find themselves in, it’s a damn fine one at that. Moreover, Hart touches on a number of other timely issues, skillfully weaving them into the story in a way that’s relatable and, at times, emotionally jarring. The character development is flawless, the pacing is smooth and steady, and the structure is on point, allowing Hart to brilliantly lay out his story, which is by far his best work to date.
A serious contender for best book of the year, Rob Hart’s The Warehouse paints a grim but helplessly entertaining picture of what happens when Big Brother meets Big Business . . . and what the world we’re currently building might look like if we’re not careful.
