Coming off an amazing summer of new releases and the return of iconic characters like Mitch Rapp in September, October is going to be another really great month for thriller fans. In fact, it might be the best month yet.
Below are my seven highest-rated thrillers coming out over the next few weeks. Whether you’re looking for hard-hitting action or nail-biting suspense, there’s a little something for everyone. Happy reading!
November Road by Lou Berney
Release Date: October 9th (William Morrow)
As the country searches for answers following the assassination of JFK, two individuals searching for new beginnings cross paths and take an instant interest in one another.
Frank Guidry learns the hard way that when it comes to the criminal underworld, everyone is expendable. After years of serving Carlos Marcello, a prominent New Orleans crime lord, Frank’s usefulness has finally run its course. Then again, so has everyone else’s, as those connected to the mob boss begin turning up dead after America’s beloved president is publicly murdered.
After dumping a car that was supposed to play a role in the shooting in Dallas, Frank discovers that a skilled hitman has been tasked with killing him before anyone uncovers the link between the assassination and Marcello. Forced to go on the run, Frank’s only chance at survival is to get all the way to Las Vegas and link up with one of Carlos Marcello’s rivals, who has the resources to make sure nobody ever finds him.
Meanwhile, Charlotte Roy also wants to disappear. With only nine hundred dollars to her name and dreams of a better life, she takes her two daughters and heads for California, hoping to escape her abusive husband.
Eventually, their paths cross when Charlotte’s car breaks down and Frank, pretending to be an insurance salesman, stops to help her and her girls. Realizing that his best chance at getting out of dodge is to pose as a family journeying west together, he does just that—with both characters using one another to get where they want to go. Along the way, however, both develop deeper feelings for each other, forcing Frank to decide between running from the hitman trying to kill him and taking a chance at living alongside Charlotte and the girls.
Choosing JFK’s assassination as the backdrop for his story was a brilliant move by Berney, who uses the uncertainty of the moment to merge two lives together in a way that’s oddly beautiful. Normally, readers might not find it easy to root for a guy who might have, kinda sorta, had a small hand in Kennedy’s murder. And yet, with Frank Guidry, Lou Berney delivers a masterful tale of redemption, running parallel to Charlotte’s inspiring message of hope. On their own, they’re entertaining, but together they’re incredibly uplifting. And by having a killer lurking in the shadows, hot on their trail and threatening their newfound happiness, Berney keeps the suspense red-lining throughout.
Wrecked by Joe Ide
Release date: October 9th (Mulholland Books)
Private Investigator Isaiah “IQ” Quintabe’s Long Beach-based PI firm has officially taken off. However, while Isaiah’s popularity soars, his bank account never got the memo. Pulling jobs for people in the neighborhood has made him well-liked, but it doesn’t pay the bills. To turn things around financially, Dodson, Isaiah’s former roommate and once partner in crime who is now a full-time business partner, has a vision of taking IQ’s services mainstream.
More of a street hustler than his genius detective counterpart, Dodson adopts a new no-more-freebies policy, and even sets up a Facebook page to advertise their services. However, things don’t go according to plan when Grace Monarova, an up-and-coming artist, enters IQ’s world and needs help tracking down her mother.
Even though she can’t pay him cash, IQ, who is taken aback by Grace, agrees to help her anyways and quickly gets to work. It doesn’t take long, though, for him to find out the hard way that Grace failed to tell him a few key details about her mother’s current situation. Like, for example, that she’s a prime murder witness against a private security firm led by ex-commando Stan Walczak, who used questionable interrogation methods on prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Unbeknownst to IQ, following Sarah’s trail puts him on a collision course with Walczak, though he’s hardly the only threat in Quintabe’s way. Also lurking behind the scenes is Seb Habimana, the African-born Oxford grad who plays Moriarty to Isaiah’s Sherlock Holmes and is able to match him on an intellectual level that sets up perfectly-written mind games between the two characters as the plot unfolds.
Though Wrecked works just fine as a standalone, readers would still be better off starting at the beginning of the series as Ide’s body of work, now three books in, has been nothing short of incredible. While his gritty prose is a perfect fit for the series’ urban setting, it’s Ide’s ability to change things up while still finding ways to develop his characters and deliver compelling storylines that keeps the series unique and fresh.
There’s a lot of heavy hitters releasing new books this month, but Ide’s is at the top of the list for me.
Holy Ghost by John Sandford
Release date: October 9th (G.P. Putnam’s Sons)
When a heavenly figure pops up, all hell breaks loose in John Sandford’s latest Virgil Flowers novel.
It all started when Mayor Wardell Holland listened to John Jacob Skinner, his seventeen-year-old sidekick, pitch him a daring idea to line the city’s coffers with tourism dollars by having his friend, Janet Fischer, pretend to be the ghost of the Virgin Mary. Ultimately, for Holland, it’s a small risk that could reap major rewards. However, what first seemed like a no-lose situation quickly turns violent and deadly when strangers from across the country visit the tiny Minnesota town to witness the staged miracle—and one of them catches a fatal bullet.
With things spiraling out of control, Flowers is tasked with traveling to Pinion and finding the killer. Though his initial search turns up no tangible evidence, the case takes a turn when another corpse is found. And then another. With the body count piling up, Flowers follows the killer’s trail—which leads to the last place he, or readers, might expect.
As always, Sandford is so good at mixing humor into his mysteries—which certainly pays off here in a big way. Whenever things take a dark turn, Flowers still manages to keep the plot light with his wit and humor. While the premise involving the Virgin Mary might sound a little Dan Brown-like, Sandford doesn’t delve deep into religious text or beliefs. Instead, it serves as a tantalizing way to ramp things up, but the story does move away from that as Flowers chases a killer on the loose.
Overall, I think this is one of the better Flowers books in years, capped off with several well-timed twists that Sandford lands with both precision and force.
The Fox by Frederick Forsyth
Release date: October 23rd (G.P. Putnam’s Sons)
Not all hackers steal money. Instead, some go after something much more valuable . . . like secrets.
The impossible has happened. The Pentagon, the NSA, and the CIA have been hacked. On the surface, the three American agencies are supposed to be virtually impenetrable. Their firewalls are the best in the world, complete with an air-gapped system that, until now, nobody has come close to cracking. But in a twist, the hacker known only as the Fox—who could have taken anything he wanted—took nothing. He did nothing. Except breach the infrastructure and then leave.
Several months after the initial hack took place, a team of black-clad Special Forces soldiers descend upon the house that experts identified as the origin of the security breach, expecting to encounter a serious physical threat from any number of enemy nations. Instead, they find a normal family occupying the house, and the only sign of computer equipment is in the attic—which is used by their autistic teenage son, Luke Jennings, who is shockingly confirmed to be the Fox.
Collectively, intelligence services around the world are stunned to learn that one of the greatest hackers to ever sit down in front of a keyboard is actually an eighteen-year-old British kid with Asperger’s. Moreover, MI5 doesn’t know what to do with Luke moving forward. Eventually, a deal is cut in Washington, where the current administration develops a plan to weaponize Jennings’ talents against America’s enemies. In the process, however, Luke is suddenly thrust into the middle of a geopolitical nightmare and forced to play a high-stakes game that he never wanted to partake in. As he follows orders, going after Russia, North Korea, and Iran, Luke quickly becomes the most wanted person in the world, and those nations will stop at nothing to capture or kill the mysterious hacker.
While John le Carre dominated headlines with last year’s A Legacy of Spies, 2018 is all about the return of Frederick Forsyth, another all-time great, and The Fox is just the kind of stunning, relevant, full-throttle story that thriller fans have been waiting for.
The Three Beths by Jeff Abbott
Release date: October 23rd (Grand Central)
A year after her mother, Beth, suddenly vanished, Mariah Dunning spots her alive and well in the food court of her local Texas shopping mall. A moment later, though, she’s gone once again.
The encounter shocks Mariah to her core. It shocks her father too, who has been the prime suspect since Beth disappeared, frequently forced to listen to neighbors and those in their Lakehaven community whisper about how he’s probably guilty and even theorize about how he got away with the crime. Motivated by the prospect of reuniting with her mother and clearing her father’s name, Mariah sets out to locate Beth—starting her investigation with a Google search that turns up an interesting result from a crime blogger who wrote about the disappearance of Mariah’s mother and another woman, Bethany Curtis, who vanished eighteen months ago.
Like her mother, Bethany Curtis was never again seen after leaving Austin for Houston in an attempt to flee her multi-millionaire tech guru husband, and the article goes on to suggest that someone might be targeting women based on their names. It’s a thin theory, but with nothing else to go on, Mariah reaches out to, and then teams up with, the blogger, who goes by the nickname Reveal, before eventually stumbling into a shocking, dangerous, and disturbing web of lies unlike anything she could have ever imagined.
It turns out that a third “Beth,” Lizbeth, previously went missing as well, and her circumstances might just hold the answers Mariah so desperately seeks.
While well-known for his Sam Capra series, Jeff Abbott has proven over the last two years that he’s able to write suspense just as well as action . . . maybe even better. While his last book, Blame, had a killer twist ending, Abbott tops himself with the final act in The Three Beths, which will leave even veteran readers stunned.
Dark Sacred Night by Michael Connelly
Release date: October 30th (Little Brown and Co.)
We’ve seen it before with Mickey Haller, who was first introduced in his own novel, and then, after a few more books of his own, eventually teamed up with Bosch. So really, from the moment Connelly introduced readers to Renee Ballard in The Late Show (2017), it always felt like it was only a matter of time until the two characters crossed paths. As it turns out, the wait was much shorter than most probably expected.
After returning back from a gruesome scene on Hollywood Boulevard, Ballard, who is still working the late show, begins writing up her report when she hears the familiar sound of metal clanking coming from somewhere in the detective bureau. Realizing that someone is opening and closing filing cabinets, she confronts the man—who turns out to be Bosch—though he leaves before she can question what he was doing.
Following the strange encounter, Ballard flips through the file Bosch was looking at in an effort to figure out what he was up to. The file, it turns out, is a cold case detailing the still-unsolved murder of a fifteen-year-old girl named Daisy Clayton. Ballard realized that the case was most recently assigned to Lucia Soto, Harry’s former partner, who is now working with the Hollywood Sexual Task Force. With a link between Bosch and the case established, Ballard, who is empathetic towards the young girl’s story, begins poking around and asking questions of her own.
Meanwhile, Bosch is still filling his free time after retiring from the LAPD by working cold cases as a reserve officer for the San Fernando Police Department. Currently, he’s working two cases—one on the job, and one on his personal time. First up is the case of Cristobal Vega, a fifty-two-year-old “shot-caller” for Varrio San Fer 13, who’d taken on a Godfather-like presence in San Fernando before someone put a bullet in his head while he was out walking his dog. While he works that case during the day, Harry spends his nights pouring over the details of Daisy Clayton’s murder, eventually teaming up with Ballard to help find the girl’s killer.
As the story unfolds, Harry catches the attention of Varrio San Fer 13, the vicious Mexican street gang, who doesn’t like where Bosch’s investigation is leading him. But just when you think you know where the story’s going, Connelly shakes things up in a big way, ramping up the suspense before delivering one of his most shocking endings yet.
While Bosch, who is now pushing seventy, is still the main draw, Ballard is gaining on him fast. Through two novels, Connelly has developed her brilliantly, fleshing out her background and motives and molding her into a bona fide new star of the genre. Harry still has an undeniable presence on the page, but Ballard brings needed freshness to the series—and their chemistry works very well on a number of levels.
Michael Connelly is one of the best crime writers ever, and somehow, he just gets better each time out. Dark Sacred Night is not to be missed.
Dark Winter by Anthony J. Tata
Release date: October 30th (Kensington)
While vacationing with his girlfriend, Cassie Bagwell, on a North Carolina island, terror strikes around the world—calling Jack Mahegan back to action.
North Korea’s leader has been killed, the first of several steps that ultimately threatens to pull America into Europe, where Russia is assembling an impressive military presence. At the same time, North Korea responds by firing a nuke at Japan, and Iran begins invading Iraq.
And that is just the beginning. . .
Getting up to speed and back into the fight, Jake and Cassie discover that a group of dark hackers are behind the global chaos. Led by Ian Gorham, a powerful media mogul who’s hellbent on taking over the world, the group has managed to sidestep the United States cybersecurity measures and infiltrate their military computers, compromising American missile and defense systems. Scrambling to prevent further destruction, Jake and his team find out that the only way to stop Gorham’s plan is to physically locate the group’s headquarters and manually shut things down. The only problem is that Gorham’s Computer Optimized Warfare headquarters are broken down into three separate facilities, each of which are situated in dangerous locations smack-dab in the middle of all the conflicts and bloodshed.
With time quickly running out before the next phase of destruction is set to begin, Jake and his team must split up, reach their targets at all costs, and shut things down before it’s too late. Mahegan has had his back up against the wall before, but he’s never faced a threat quite like this one—and this time, he might have finally bit off more than he can chew.
While the retired brigadier general is known for his action sequences, which are still front and center here, Tata displays an impressive touch with how he handles Jake’s development and his ability to plot out his stories. Likewise, his threat scenarios are some of the most riveting in the genre today, and Tata knows how to ramp things up while holding readers on the edge of their seats.
If you like Mark Greaney or Brad Taylor and haven’t discovered Tata’s work, trust me, don’t wait another second.
