When Josephine Newbury gets a job working for a mysterious organization on the outskirts of town, she and her husband Joseph are beyond relieved; Josephine’s been unemployed for months, and the couple’s financial situation is dire. Never mind that her nameless, faceless employer forces her to sit alone in a windowless room typing numbers into a top-secret database—it pays the bills, and she still gets to go home to Joseph every night. Soon, though, her husband starts acting strangely, and before long, he’s disappearing for hours at a time without explanation. As the distance between them grows, Josephine gets closer to discovering the awful truth of what The Database actually is, and what the numbers she’s entering represent.

Helen Phillips’ debut novel, The Beautiful Bureaucrat, resists categorization. The plot is dazzling and the pace is breathless, but I wouldn’t shelve it alongside the latest thriller. It does contain a mystery—several, in fact—but no crime is committed, and Josephine isn’t much of a sleuth. Comparisons to works from Franz Kafka, Italo Calvino, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman are inevitable; The Beautiful Bureaucrat is a meditation on life, death, fate, and free will. It offers commentary on the rat race, the economy, and the absurd nature of corporate America. Anxiety and paranoia loom large; heartbreak, yearning, and despair abound; and there’s certainly some question as to whether Josephine’s mental faculties are intact.

What really sets this book apart, though—and for me, defines it—is how gracefully, intelligently, and incisively Phillips writes about love. The Beautiful Bureaucrat captures what it is like to seek solace in a soul mate and to call a relationship home. Phillips does a marvelous job placing you inside Josephine’s head and showing you how one person can be capable of inspiring both unspeakable joy and profound despair.

The Beautiful Bureaucrat is at once an intellectual exercise and an emotional roller coaster. Equal parts fever dream, existential crisis, and true romance, this is not a book for genre purists, but it perfectly illustrates why we should grant authors the freedom to color outside the lines.

Hit men in crime fiction are nothing new. Even hit men with a conscience—the kind who feel something other than glee, the kind who feel something at all when they pull the trigger—aren’t a revelation. But a hit man who only kills other hit men? That’s original. Chris Holm’s whip-smart tale of a different kind of professional killer moves as fast as the bullets fired by his hero, Special Forces vet Michael Hendricks, and with wit as dry as the Afghani desert where Hendricks allegedly died. Only his best, and only, friend, fellow soldier Lester Meyers, knows that Hendricks is still alive and that he’s taken up an unusual occupation.

Hendricks isn’t a contract killer, not quite. Contract killers murder innocent people for money. Like Robin Hood with a higher body count and a sniper rifle, Hendricks takes out contract killers before they can complete their missions. He contacts potential victims and offers his protection from whatever gory fate is about to befall them.

When Hendricks foils, with skill befitting his time in the military, a hit on a wealthy Miami businessman, he not only kills a hit man with an impressively lethal résumé, but also draws the attention of a dangerous group of men. Known as the Council, the group consists of representatives from all of America’s major crime families, from the Italians to the Russians and everything in between. This is not the first time Hendricks has scuttled one of the Council’s plans, but this time the members are fed up. And whom do you call to take out a hit man who took out your hit man? Another hit man, of course.

If Hendricks kills because he can’t “help but try and make things right, one murder at a time,” the man sent to kill him is very different. Alexander Engelmann, a Swiss killer with a black hole where his heart should be, is as ruthless as Hendricks is principled, and now he’s on Hendricks’ trail.

No bad guy story—even a bad guy story with a bad guy who’s bad for good reasons—is complete without a good guy, or in this case, a good woman, on his heels. Too often when a writer hits his or her stride with a complicated and realistically flawed character, the rest of the cast come across as afterthoughts, shadows of stereotypes needed to fill up space on the page until the hero, or anti-hero, can take center stage again. Holm avoids that problem with FBI Special Agent Charlotte “Charlie” Thompson, a character as compelling and real as the “ghost”—her name for Hendricks—she’s chasing. Thompson is good at her job without falling into the worn trope of the female law enforcement officer who’s so competent that she alienates her fellow cops or agents.

Holm creates and maintains real suspense throughout as Hendricks finds himself in increasingly dangerous situations with increasingly higher odds of dying.

That, perhaps, is the greatest strength of a character like Hendricks: he is a broken man who never pretends to be anything else. He’s not a sadist like Engelmann, who revels in the pain he causes. Hendricks can’t help but care because what’s broken inside him, ironically, makes him better at his job. When a target he’s protecting is in trouble, during one of the book’s tensest scenes set in a claustrophobic casino ballroom, Hendricks fears for the man’s safety, even when his own life is at risk: “That fact shouldn’t have mattered to him. If he were half as cold-blooded as he thought he was, it wouldn’t have.” But it does matter and that, in the end, is reason enough to root for a man who kills for a living.

Set in Atlanta, on the eve of the International Cotton Exposition of 1881, this richly detailed novel from Matthew Guinn (The Resurrectionist) packs quite a punch. The Scribe introduces Sheriff Thomas Canby, born in the South but raised culturally Irish, thanks to his schoolteacher father. Fired from the Atlanta police force, his reputation in shambles, Canby now works in the mountain hamlet of Ringgold. An urgent telegram from his old boss and mentor, Chief of Police Vernon Thompson, summons him back to the city to catch a killer. Two black men are dead, both with a letter of the alphabet carved into their foreheads. Vernon assigns him an unlikely partner, Cyrus Underwood, Atlanta’s first black police officer. Cyrus might be free by law, but “The Ring” of wealthy white businessmen who really run the town make sure he knows his place.

Author Guinn skillfully drops us into an Atlanta struggling to embrace the modern machine age, yet unwilling to let go of its plantation past. As the murders progress from black entrepreneurs to anyone in the way, Canby is encouraged to think the killer is some “crazed Negro,” but evidence begins to point in a direction The Ring is uncomfortable with. From tiny details like the chiming of a pewter bell that summons a servant to his master’s bidding, to the “salon” of childhood friend Mamie O’Donnell where the races have no problem mixing, the chapters jump with the life of the times.

Canby is a complex figure, worthy of another book, while Underwood elicits empathy as he balances his life on a daily tightrope of racial tension. Other outstanding characters are Julia, the courageous teacher Canby loves; Leon Greenberg, Jewish owner of a pencil factory who pays a terrible penalty for being a foreign Yankee and arrogant businessman; and Colonel Billingsley, a man determined to bring electricity to Atlanta. This book is angry, philosophical, and vastly entertaining. You can feel Atlanta, the elegant city destroyed by General Sherman and his troops in the Civil War, struggle to represent the New South—one focused on the future but still dragging the past behind her.

It is shortly after the turn of the century, some 20 years after Jessie James was killed in St. Joseph, Missouri, in 1882, when traveling secretary extraordinaire and amateur sleuth Hattie Davish returns to her hometown to attend the funeral of her friend’s father. But her friend Ginny doesn’t seem pleased to see her, and, although the deceased was disfigured from a horse trampling accident, Hattie is not sure that the person in the casket is actually Ginny’s father.

After the funeral, Hattie is invited to speak at her alma mater, Mrs. Chaplin’s School for Women, where she was once a star pupil. Strange things start to happen at the school where Ginny’s father was bookkeeper. Not only that, but Hattie begins to have the distinct feeling that someone is following her. The hometown mysteries multiply when she is asked to help a woman find her husband, who may or may not have been a patient at the local asylum where Hattie’s own father died some 20 years earlier.

In this fourth Hattie Davish mystery, long before the advent of computers or even electric typewriters, Hattie uses a pencil and paper to write down the questions that keep arising, and then follows up on those questions to try to work her way through a murderous maze. Her investigative technique lies somewhere between the meticulous Hercule Poirot and the conversational Miss Marple. Although several fortuitous coincidences help her get to the bottom of things, this is a well-written historical mystery that brought the period to life and kept me interested and guessing.

In Mark Stevens’ fourth Allison Coil mystery, Lake of Fire, Allison, a Colorado hunting guide, learns in the midst of a devastating wildfire that an environmentalist friend of hers has been found murdered in the Flat Tops Wilderness. As she investigates with her friend Trudy and the reporter Duncan Bloom, the murder is revealed as part of a dangerous plot that the three work to foil.

Lake of Fire takes readers into the heart of Colorado, and the lives of its inhabitants. From farming families to people living in the wilds, everything and everyone in Stevens’ novel feels authentic. The story is told from Allison’s point of view, but Trudy, Bloom, and wilderness man Devo contribute chapters from their own perspectives, giving readers a well-rounded look at the urgency of the wildfire and the murder investigation.

As Allison closes in on the truth there are plenty of surprises and some startling twists and turns. Remembering how characters are related to one another, and how they link to the mystery, is confusing at times. And Allison relates some experiences from previous books that may confuse readers not already familiar with the series, but overall Lake of Fire is an engrossing read.

“Make me.” That old childhood dare could be Jack Reacher’s mantra if he cared about things like that. Instead the iconic hero of Lee Child’s latest book, Make Me, gives readers another head-butting good time. Riding a train on his way to Chicago, Reacher impulsively stops at a town called Mother’s Rest because the name intrigues him. There's not much of note about the dusty Oklahoma farming town except soaring grain silos, seed merchants, and fertilizer dealers—until Michelle Chang steps out of the shadows. Part of a loosely organized chain of retired FBI agents working as private detectives, she’s searching for her associate who has disappeared. She asks for Reacher’s help and together their search takes them across the country. Along the way the pair survives a violent home invasion, various assassination attempts, and a look into the frightening Internet underworld of something called the Deep Web.

With a background in the FBI and the military, PI Chang is older, wiser, and more experienced than your average thriller heroine. A budding romance between Reacher and Chang hints at her return in the next book, which would be fine with me. Written with the style and pacing we’ve come to expect from Lee Child, fans will enjoy number 20 in this bestselling series.

The Girl Without a Name is Sandra Block’s second novel, and also the second to feature Dr. Zoe Goldman. Zoe is a resident in training on her pediatric psychiatry rotation at the Children’s Hospital of Buffalo in New York. It is a difficult rotation for Zoe because she finds working with mentally ill children depressing. Zoe has her own problems, too. She is still mourning the death of her mother and the breakup of her relationship with the beautiful, very French Jean Luc. Plus, she is on probation for flunking her RITE (residency in-service training examination) and with all the stress, her ADHD is even more difficult to manage.

The hospital routine is enlivened when the police bring in a catatonic African-American girl for admission. The girl is a mystery. She has no history and no name. The nurses call her Jane, as in Jane Doe, and Zoe takes a personal interest. She begins an amateur investigation, posting Jane’s photograph on a missing children’s website, creating a Facebook post, and convincing her brother to search the Internet with facial recognition software. Her only real clue is a small round scar on the girl’s ankle. She does all this and more to the growing annoyance of the detective assigned to the case and the girl’s attending physician.

The mystery is smoothly told and develops steadily. The main questions of who Jane is and the cause of her catatonia are buttressed by Zoe’s enthusiastic if, at times, erratic personality. She is flawed, self-doubting, and relentless.

The hospital descriptions have the ring of truth, and the patients with their myriad mental disorders are fascinating: an anorexic, a meth addict, a budding psychopath. The mystery is well disguised, and the outcome is uncertain until the final pages. A little luck is needed for Zoe to solve it, but the surprising and believable climax more than compensates.

The quality of a Spenser novel, be it by Robert B. Parker or his successor Ace Atkins, depends greatly on the power of the villains whom the sleuth must overcome. Through the years, Parker continued to make his creation increasingly impervious to harm, not only removing suspense from the stories, but lumbering the character with a somewhat off-putting, one might even say godlike self-satisfaction. I assume that’s why, in the novel Small Vices, he introduced Ruger, the Gray Man, an assassin who wounds Spenser seriously enough to remind the sleuth of his mortality. Atkins doesn’t take it quite that far in his new addition to the series, but he does present Spenser with a situation the usually confident sleuth is forced to admit he may not be able to handle. In the township of Blackburn outside of Boston, hard-nosed judge Joe Scali has a habit of handing down major sentences to minors for, well, minor crimes. When 17-year-old Dillon Yates gets sent to a tough juvie facility for Internet goofing on his school’s vice principal, his mother asks Spenser to help. The private eye discovers that something is definitely rotten in Blackburn, but the town’s judge and law enforcement are in on it. Before long Spenser is facing prison himself, calling into play a very efficient lawyer named Megan (perhaps a shout-out to novelist Megan Abbott, whom the character resembles). This is a particularly engrossing helping of Spenser lore, with a bunch of extremely despicable bad guys, a clever crime, a very smart solution, and longtime friend Hawk providing exactly the kind of backup we know and love. Mantegna, who played Spenser in a few TV adaptations, provides a more satisfying narration than usual, mainly, I think, because Atkins has limited the detective’s use of wiseguy sarcasm, the interpretation of which the actor has a tendency to overdo.