Would you kill to keep your secrets? Mystery authors seem to think you would and there are a lot of mystery novels based on lies and secrets being covered up by murder. Unfortunately for the killer, those secrets tend to come out as the investigation progresses. The following novels are not an exception to this, but instead fall right into this category. From a husband’s infidelity to a family hiding its ugly past, all of these books examine the dark side of keeping secrets.

Reading right now:

“Confessions on the 7:45” by Lisa Unger starts with the chance encounter of two female strangers on a train, one of which confesses to an affair with her boss while the other states that her husband is sleeping with their nanny. After the encounter, Selena’s nanny disappears and her marriage goes even farther downhill. She wonders about the woman on the train until one day she receives a text from her saying they should continue their conversation. Selene wonders how this stranger got her phone number which starts off a theme regarding the place technology holds in our life that runs throughout the book. Deception is another theme throughout the book which Unger exploits by introducing many characters who weave in and out of the novel until the end when we find out what links them together and gives the novel unexpected twists. This is an interesting addition to the domestic thriller subgenre and plays homage to “Strangers on a Train” by Patricia Highsmith.

On hold right now:

“Snow” is the first in a new series by the award winning John Banville who holds the place as Ireland’s leading author. This is an historical mystery set in 1957 in Ireland where the Catholic Church rules the countryside. When a parish priest is found dead in the home of an aristocratic family, Detective Inspector St. John Strafford is called in to investigate the death.  In this new novel, Banville takes Agatha Christie’s country house murders to the dark side. The Priest has been castrated, the owners of the manor house are much hated privileged Protestants, there is drug use and mental illness. There are many secrets to uncover and St. John Strafford is determined to search through them until he finds the murderer. Banville also writes very successful mystery novels under the name Benjamin Black.

“Still Life” is award winning Scottish author Val McDermid’s sixth book in her Inspector Karen Pirie series. In this addition to the series, Pirie juggles two cases at once. Pirie is already working to discover the killer of a skeleton that was discovered abandoned in a campervan when fishermen pull a dead man from the sea who is a suspect in a decade-old disappearance of a prominent civil servant. While solving both cases, Pirie uncovers lies and secrets which have been covered up far too long.

Lee Child and his brother Andrew Child have teamed up to write the 25^th Jack Reacher novel called “The Sentinel.” This book could not be more timely since it centers around Russian interference in our elections. Ironically Reacher is a character who knows nothing about technology and travels around the country with no phone and no computer, but that isn’t going to stop him from protecting the young IT guy he runs into in a small town outside of Nashville, Tennessee, or uncovering a shocking secret element living in that small town.

Other Mysterious Things:

There is much to look forward to this month especially with David Baldacci’s third book in the Atlee Pine series (“Daylight”) coming out November 17 and Michael Connelly adding the sixth book to his Lincoln Lawyer series “The Law of Innocence.” October was a great month and so much came out that I will still be visiting those books. In fact just last week, Lisa Jackson’s third book in her San Francisco romantic suspense series came out (“You Betrayed Me”). Last week also saw the release of Nicci French’s “House of Correction.” With people having to stay home and hide from our pandemic, I have a feeling that we are soon going to reap the reward of having authors stuck in their house writing and writing and writing. At last something to look forward to.