Thrillers

Locked-room mysteries and thrillers are booming, but this one has a twist. In the 1990s, young Grace DeRoche’s family lives in a Canadian branch of the FLDS, the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Talk about a locked room. Children in the cult headed by Warren Jeffs, who in real life has only left the FBI’s Most-Wanted list because he’s serving a life sentence for child sexual assault, live with their fathers and the men’s multiple wives in Brigham, a secretive, abusive compound. They spend their days praying, in fear of outside-world apostates, are illiterate, and are subject to harsh “corrections.” Girls are married young to much older men. After the police come and “Brigham’s Ten”—Grace and nine other children—escape, the rest of the compound dies by mass suicide. In the years that follow, Grace remains in the locked room of her mind: she has dissociative identity disorder, with multiple personas taking over when she’s stressed. Stress comes in the deaths of members of the Ten, and Detective Beau Brunelli must protect Grace, a challenge when the woman doesn’t believe she needs protection and is too frightened and confused to accept help. Freedman could have made this sensationalist, but it’s a thought-provoking read, providing a look at life after a cult and portraying the survivors as real people, warts and all. The shocking ending here is a reward of its own, and getting there is a journey through incredible details of life inside Warren Jeffs’ world and inside the mind of a troubled woman. While you wait, try the Netflix documentary Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey, which covers the FLDS and is also absorbing.

In Paris’s latest thriller, a London woman’s trip from rags to riches and back again is a tense fight against a wealthy man who can’t be denied his out-of-control wishes. The tale alternates between two timelines. In the present, readers find Amelie Lamont kidnapped and trapped one floor above her husband, Ned Hawthorpe, who’s also kidnapped and whose rich father doesn’t seem too interested in getting him back. While they wait, Ned makes clear that he’s his stone-cold father’s son, telling the kidnappers that they can go ahead and kill Amelie as it will make his father cough up the money. The past timeline, which takes place several years earlier in the 1990s, shows how Amelie got into this nightmare, starting when her widowed father died and left her homeless. She finds her way to a job at a magazine, with Ned the boss. Desperate for money for college, she makes a startling deal with the rich man, one she immediately regrets. Both Amelie’s time in her dark prison and the lead up to it are psychologically reminiscent of Emma Donoghue’s Room, portraying the intense inner machinations of a woman pushed to the brink. But this web of fear and lies is much more complex, satisfyingly so, than Room, involving many more characters, intricate plotting, and layers of subterfuge. Paris’s fans won’t be disappointed and readers new to the author will be hooked.

Rhys Lloyd, a former opera singer, has recently built a series of luxury homes overlooking Mirror Lake, on the boundary between Wales and England. Neither the process nor the end results endear him to the locals, to say the least. To attempt to mend fences, and bring the townies and the posh lake crowd together, he throws a massive New Year’s Eve party, only to disappear in the middle of it. When Rhys’s body is found floating in the lake on New Year’s morning, no one seems all that surprised. Nor sad. Not the town folk, not his wife, and certainly not DC Ffion Morgan, who is assigned to the case. Ffion is a local, back home after a failed marriage, and her search for the killer brings her close to people she’s known her whole life, and close to secrets of her own. Against her wishes, she’s paired with DC Leo Brady from the English side of the lake, and they provide every sort of tension imaginable, from national to sexual, giving the book a good bit of levity. Like the TV series “Broadchurch” and the novels of Ann Cleeves, this wonderful novel takes the reader—through twists and turns, and red herrings aplenty—deep within a community. Crime fiction is a whole lot better now that DC Ffion Morgan has arrived.