Summertime and the Reading Is Thrilling!

These long summer days are a perfect time to kick back, take some time off from work, and head to the beach or a back porch, grab a large iced tea or a cold beer, and get deeply involved with a novel marked by a frenetic energy and the accompanying sensation of being borne along by the twists and turns of the plot. These thrillers will have you turning pages with increased haste, and your anxiety levels will hit new highs as the story unspools from start to finish. Readers should be warned, however, that in many of these books there are graphic (but rarely gratuitous) descriptions of violence as well as strenuous bouts of sex, some drug-enhanced. Enjoy.

Richard Morgan's hardboiled, very noirish sf mystery ALTERED CARBON (Del Rey: Ballantine. 2003. ISBN 0-345-45768-4. pap. $13.95; LJ 1/03) is a roller coaster of a read. In the 25th century, Takeshi Kovacs, a former soldier under the auspices of the United Nations, is hired by a wealthy industrialist on Earth (168 light years away from Kovacs's home planet) who was either murdered or committed suicide. It is up to Kovacs to discover which it was—a job that will test his instincts, threaten his life, and place his closest friends in peril. Morgan has created a realistic futuristic world (in this author's capable hands that's no oxymoron), in which hotels pack lethal weapons, the gap between rich and poor is enormous, and the essence of a human is the digital pack that contains all of his or her memories and personality (and is downloadable indefinitely into new bodies—"sleeves"—an invention that makes immortality a way of life for the rich).

Paul Eddy's complicated thriller FLINT (Onyx. 2001. ISBN 0-451-40995-7. pap. $6.99; LJ 8/00) features a likable female protagonist and dastardly, violent villains who traffic in treachery. Badly hurt in a sting operation that goes terribly wrong, London Police Inspector Grace Flint is determined to track down the person responsible, someone who is deeply involved in a high-level money laundering operation. As Flint risks life and limb seeking her man, British intelligence hunts for her. Although Eddy, a political correspondent and former crime reporter for London's Sunday Times, owes a great debt to John le Carré, that in no way takes anything away from this most excellent first novel. And best of all, there's a sequel: FLINT'S LAW (Putnam. 2002. ISBN 0-399-14838-8. $24.95).

I went through Lee Child's high-octane, heart-racing seven novels as though they were popcorn, just gobbling them down one after the other. I finished his latest, PERSUADER (Delacorte. 2003. ISBN 0-385-33666-7. $24.95; LJ 4/1/03), convinced that Child is one of the few authors whose books featuring a series character just get better and better. A close cousin to John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee, Child's hero, Jack Reacher, is an ex-military policeman for the Marines, now always on the road, working (usually at physical labor) only when he needs money and frequently helping women in distress, whose problems tend to be far more complicated than they appear on the surface. The bad guys are chillingly amoral and truly vicious, and the novels are marked by quite a lot of violence. You don't need to read the books in any particular order, but you might want to try the first one, Killing Floor, or one of my other favorites, Running Blind.

An older novel that I reread every two or three years is Anthony Hyde's deliciously atmospheric and complex thriller THE RED FOX, originally published in 1985 and now, unfortunately, out of print. When an old girlfriend asks journalist Robert Thorne to help locate her missing father, a wealthy fur dealer, Thorne stumbles into a case that turns out to revolve around an event that took place more than 50 years before. Hyde has created an intelligent spy thriller that will especially appeal to lovers of Cold War history.

It's a bit of a stretch to call Mark Costello's BIG IF (Norton. 2002. ISBN 0-393-05116-1. $24.95; pap. Harvest. 2003. ISBN 0-15-602779-8. $14; LJ 5/1/02) a thriller, but, hey, the subject matter is terror, and the main character, Vi Asplund, is a secret service agent assigned to guard the vice president (now running for president). It's a terrific character-driven novel, postmodernly big in scope but intimate in its depictions of a group of people whose lives converge during a presidential primary campaign. There are echoes here of both Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections and Don DeLillo's novels, especially White Noise, but the characters Costello has invented and his wonderful up-to-the-minute plot make this an entirely original novel—one that is simply not to be missed. Costello is also the author of the thriller BAG MEN (Harvest. 2003. ISBN 0-15-602821-2. pap. $14), originally written under the pseudonym of John Flood and now reissued under Costello's real name.

In PATTERN RECOGNITION (Putnam. 2003. ISBN 0-399-14986-4. $25.95; LJ 2/1/03), William Gibson, best known among his many fans as the father of cyberpunk, moves into the mainstream with this thriller. Cayce Pollard is a "cool-hunter," hired by marketing firms to spot trends, approve ad campaigns, and generally "get" the zeitgeist before everyone else. Her newest job involves trying to discover the circumstances surrounding snippets of a film that show up mysteriously on the Internet at irregular intervals, a search that takes her from New York to Japan to Russia. Gibson, whose work is generally set in the farther future, sets this in the weeks and months immediately after 9/11—and part of what's driving Cayce is finding answers about the disappearance of her father following the destruction of the World Trade Center. The book has a lot of charm and a surprising amount of noncloying sweetness that is positively refreshing in a cool and composed postmodern novel. Fans of Jonathan Dee's Palladio, also about the advertising business, will want to read this, too.