www.nytimes.com/2023/12/02/books/review/best-thrillers-2023.html
The Best Thrillers of 2023
They include an espionage caper, the tale of a murderous librarian and a high-stakes adventure that takes place inside the various stomachs of a whale.
By Sarah Lyall
Dec. 2, 2023
This year’s best thrillers come in various shades of suspense, dread and wonder. But each leads the reader down a twisty path toward an unknown destination.
Let’s begin with Daniel Kraus’s wholly original, almost obscenely entertaining WHALEFALL (MTV Books, 336 pp., $27.99), which concerns the efforts of a hapless 17-year-old named Jay Gardiner to escape from a most improbable prison.
Jay’s father, Mitt, a legendary diver and mean drunk, recently drowned himself off the coast of Monterey, Calif., suffering from terminal cancer. But when Jay tries to help his grieving family by recovering his father’s remains, he is slurped up by a passing whale, becoming an unexpected side dish to the whale’s main meal of giant squid.
As he fights his way out, Jay has in his arsenal an hour’s worth of oxygen and a lifetime of lessons, on whales as well as humans, imparted to him by his dad. Kraus, the author of numerous science fiction and fantasy novels — and, with Guillermo del Toro, of the novel version of the film “The Shape of Water” — infuses his prose with a scientist’s rigor and a poet’s sensibility.
Everyone needs a good legal thriller for Christmas. This year, it’s Martin Clark’s excellent THE PLINKO BOUNCE (Rare Bird Books, 270 pp., $28), set in rural Virginia and starring a straight-shooting public defender named Andy Hughes. As the book begins, Andy is gearing up to take on a final case before starting a fancy new job at a big law firm.
His client, a violent ex-con accused of murdering a woman in a drug-fueled frenzy, is obviously guilty. But Andy is too conscientious to provide anything other than a top-notch defense, and he finds major holes in the prosecution’s case. The courtroom scenes are authoritative — Clark, the author of several previous novels, is a retired Virginia circuit court judge — and compelling in a pleasingly unflashy way. Readers will feel they’re in good hands.
They might also think they know what’s coming, but they don’t. As Clark explains, a “Plinko bounce” refers to the unpredictable behavior of the plastic disks dropped into a giant vertical peg board in a game on “The Price Is Right.” But this is not a game, and when the bounce happens, it’s truly shocking.
Many of us have been unnerved to find out how ubiquitous facial-recognition technology is at places like airports. If one thing is clear from reading Anthony McCarten’s high-octane GOING ZERO (Harper, 295 pp., $30), it’s that we have no clue how much of our private lives we’ve already given up.
The book begins when a megalomaniacal tech bazillionaire named Cy Baxter, an evil amalgam of Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, recruits 10 people to test the Fusion Initiative, a state-of-the-art surveillance system he’s devised with the U.S. government.
The volunteers are competing to evade the system for an entire month; anyone who remains un-found gets $3 million. But one by one, they go down, puny adversaries for the formidable arsenal of drones, cameras, virtual-reality devices, satellites, A.I.-enhanced research techniques and other technologies brought to bear against them.
But a lone volunteer, a Boston librarian — “single, childless, nearsighted” — manages to elude the system. And then the book cranks into a new gear, as we learn who this remarkable woman is, what she really wants and the lengths she is prepared to go to get it. “Privacy is passé,” Baxter says. That’s his opinion.
As you begin Sally Hepworth’s sly psychological puzzle THE SOULMATE (St. Martin’s, 327 pp., $28.99), please understand that what you’re seeing in the first few chapters is only part of the story, a sleight of hand perpetrated by the author. The book opens simply enough, with Pippa Gerard watching her husband, Gabe, try to talk a woman out of throwing herself over the cliff outside their house, a notorious spot for suicides.
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But why does Gabe seem to be reaching toward the distressed woman — something he had been instructed never to do — as she teeters on the edge, then falls? And why, if Pippa loves her husband as much as she claims, did she once take an online survey called “Is Your Partner a Sociopath?” Hepworth metes out her information slowly and expertly, adding new ingredients to the pot so that instead of the simple broth with which we started we end up with a five-course dinner.
The dead woman, Amanda, narrates some of the chapters from beyond the grave. She wants to make something clear. “Unlike the scores of people who have come to this spot before me,” she says, “I did not come here to die.”
Watching two diabolical women try to outsmart each other while maintaining their placid facades in the library where they work is only one of the many pleasures of Laura Sims’s deliciously unsettling HOW CAN I HELP YOU (Putnam, 240 pp., $27). The book begins with Margo, an outwardly cheerful librarian with a big secret: In her previous job, she was a nurse with a knack for murdering her patients.
With her fake name and new identity, she seems to have gotten away with it. But she can’t escape her insatiable hunger for killing. And with the arrival of a new research librarian, a failed novelist named Patricia who suspects that Margo is hiding something and that it might make a great subject for her next book, Margo’s tenuous grip on sanity begins to slip away.
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It’s no coincidence that both women admire Shirley Jackson’s “We Have Always Lived in the Castle,” with its subversive belief that even murderous psychopaths deserve our sympathy, or at least our understanding. But is there room in the library — or, for that matter, in the world in general — for both Margo and Patricia? Probably not.
Anyone who has yet to discover the particular genius of Mick Herron, author of the darkly hilarious “Slow Horses” espionage novels, is in for a serious treat. His latest book, THE SECRET HOURS (Soho Crime, 384 pp., $27.95), isn’t part of the series but exists in its larger universe — featuring some familiar characters and providing a jaw-dropping back story for one of them.
The book begins with a bravura action sequence set in the English countryside. Who knew that a rotting badger carcass could be such a useful weapon? It’s unclear how this harrowing chase through a bunch of fields and back roads fits in with the rest of the story, but tuck it away in your mind, because Herron will return to it later.
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We then switch to London, where an unnamed former prime minister of dubious morals — hello, Boris Johnson! — has spitefully set up a far-reaching inquiry into historical wrongdoing at MI5, Britain’s domestic security service. It’s a deadly dull exercise until suddenly one of its members receives a classified case file about a botched operation and subsequent cover-up dating back to 1994 Berlin, and everything changes.
As always, Herron is at his best when he’s laying bare the amusing petty rivalries and elaborate machinations of bureaucrats and spies. It’s not necessary to read any of his other books before reading this one, but once you start, you’ll want to read them all.
Sarah Lyall is a writer at large, working for a variety of desks including Sports, Culture, Media and International. Previously she was a correspondent in the London bureau, and a reporter for the Culture and Metro desks.
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