Havoc
By Christopher Bollen
This deliciously nasty tale of resentment and revenge is set in a hotel in Egypt, where an elderly woman who enjoys secretly meddling in the lives of others has set up residence during Covid. The arrival of another guest — a boy of 8 who can match her, diabolical deed for diabolical deed — threatens to destroy her carefully constructed spider web of intrigue. Bollen writes with wit and style about an increasingly unhinged battle of wills between two unlikely opponents.
The Sequel
By Jean Hanff Korelitz
Korelitz delivers another sizzler of a story about literary theft and murder. Readers of her earlier book, “The Plot,” will welcome the return of the diabolical Anna Williams-Bonner. Posing as a grieving widow and promoting her novel — a fictionalized account of her husband’s death — she gets an unsettling note from an unknown person who appears to know too much about her past. Anna has a lot to hide, and a knack for eliminating her enemies.
Bright Objects
By Ruby Todd
In 1997, the residents of a small Australian town are waiting for the arrival of a comet that has not been seen for more than 4,000 years. Meanwhile, a young widow is desperate to find out who drove the car that killed her husband, and a number of townspeople are falling under the spell of a charismatic cult leader. The prose burns bright in this luminous novel.
The Winner
By Teddy Wayne
Hired to teach tennis in an exclusive New England WASP enclave one summer, young and impecunious Conor O’Toole breaks Tennis Pro Rule No. 1: Do not sleep with any sexy but possibly unhinged middle-aged divorcées. (And if you do, don’t also sleep with their daughters.) Wayne has a pitch-perfect understanding of this tiny slice of American privilege, a way of getting the reader to sympathize with Conor as his life takes a desperate turn. The tension is almost unbearable.
The Hunter
By Tana French
Old alliances and subtle resentments bubble beneath the surface in the rural Irish village where Cal Hooper, the ex-cop from Chicago who featured in French’s previous novel, is still figuring out how to fit in. The arrival of a smooth-talking Englishman with a dodgy get-rich-quick scheme touches off a series of startling events. This expertly plotted book revolves around a murder tucked in the middle, but the real mysteries lie in the insular community.
Nobody’s Hero
By M.W. Craven
Lethal weapons used in this high-body-count romp — starring Ben Koenig, a former U.S. marshal who’s unable to feel fear — include a credit card, a hairpin and, in a particularly gruesome moment, a shard of bone protruding from the mangled leg of the person wielding it. There’s a complex and preposterous plot involving something called the Acacia Avenue Protocol that imagines a scenario too awful to contemplate and some truly hilarious observational humor amid the mayhem. Koenig is funny as well as fearless.
The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels
By Janice Hallett
A true-crime writer reinvestigates a bizarre 18-year-old incident in a provincial English town, where members of a cult who claimed to be angels in human form persuaded a teenager that her baby was the Antichrist. (Several people died violently, though not the baby.) Hallett unspools her compelling and unusual story through texts, emails, WhatsApp messages, newspaper clippings, interview transcripts and the like, so the reader gets the fun of playing detective along with the characters.
What Happened to Nina?
By Dervla McTiernan
Nina, 20, never comes home from a weekend spent away with her controlling and squirrelly boyfriend, who claims she was fine when he left. Despite its title, this disturbing, enthralling book is less about what happened to Nina (you’ll find out soon enough) than about how the couple’s unlucky parents — all terrified and desperate in their own ways — respond to the unspeakable situations in which they find themselves.
The Night Guest
By Hildur Knútsdóttir
This exquisitely creepy novella features Iðunn, a seemingly rational Icelandic woman who doesn’t understand why she’s so tired all the time or why she’s been waking up with dirt (among other things) on her hands. Then one morning, her fitness app reveals that she walked 17 miles in her sleep. Trust me, the nightmarish truth is worse than anything you can imagine.
The God of the Woods
By Liz Moore
When a 13-year-old girl goes missing from her summer camp in the Adirondacks in 1975, it feels like one tragedy too many for her well-off parents, whose son, then age 8, disappeared 14 years earlier. Using multiple points of view and setting the story in two different but equally absorbing timelines, Moore explores class dynamics, family secrets, generational guilt and the difficulties of adolescence in this immersive book.
The post The Best Thrillers of 2024 appeared first on New York Times.
