#Review - The Shadow Friends by Tess Gerritsen #Espionage #Thriller

Series: The Martini Club # 3
Format: 307 pages, Hardcover

Release Date: August 25, 2026
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Source: Publisher
Genre: Espionage, Thriller

When a renowned disease expert and Russian defector dies mysteriously during a global affairs conference in Purity, Maine, the tight-knit band of former spies in the Martini Club once again sees their quiet coastal retirement interrupted by international intrigue. And when a waitress at the conference hotel is found murdered, Ingrid Slocum sees chilling links to a disastrous mission that nearly killed her three decades ago.

Desperate to uncover the truth, Ingrid’s drawn back into the game by a magnetic ex-CIA colleague—and former lover—who was with her on the long-ago doomed mission. He convinces her to join him, and together they head to Amsterdam to track down her would-be killer.

Ingrid’s frantic husband Lloyd and Maggie Bird are close behind, but a clandestine network of assassins is intent on stopping them. Forced to question every allegiance, the Martini Club must rely on the skills they tried to leave behind. Because in this game of revenge and deception, the past never dies—it just hides in the shadows.

The Shadow Friends is the Third installment in author Tess Gerritsen's The Martini Club series. The Martini Club consists of former Agency operatives (Maggie Bird, Declan Rose, Ben Diamond, Ingrid Slocum, and analyst husband Lloyd) who have settled in the quiet coastal Maine town of Purity for martinis, friendship, and a quieter life. That quiet rarely lasts. Recently, Purity Police Chief Jo Thibodeau learned about the Club's operations and has become the bulwark against other agencies looking too closely at the club members. 

The novel opens nearly three decades earlier in a Provence safe house, where young operative Ingrid is protecting a young woman who has turned against a Russian organized-crime syndicate. The mission collapses in violence: the protectee is killed, a colleague is executed with a signature stiletto through the eye, and one attacker may have escaped. The present-day story returns to Purity, where Ingrid is organizing a local global-affairs/disease-control conference at a resort. The keynote speaker, a Russian defector and bioweapons/disease expert (Dr. Mikhail Maslov), falls ill and dies of poisoning. 

Almost simultaneously, a young waitress is found murdered in a car trunk with the same distinctive stiletto wound. The killing method immediately links the present crimes to Ingrid’s old failure. Her former colleague and lover, Rodrigo Estrada (now running a private intelligence firm called Argus), reappears and draws her back into the field. When Ingrid vanishes, her husband Lloyd and Maggie follow the trail to Amsterdam and beyond, while the rest of the Club and local police chief Jo Thibodeau work the Maine end of the case. 

The story expands into questions of lingering Cold War-style networks, personal loyalties, and whether the past can ever truly be outrun. The dual timeline is used effectively: the opening Provence sequence is widely noted as one of the book’s strongest set pieces, establishing stakes and character history without feeling like mere backstory. The shift into international territory gives the series more scale and menace than the more localized earlier books, while still retaining the charm of the aging-but-still-competent protagonists. 

The international plot, while more ambitious, occasionally leans on familiar Russian-assassin tropes. Ingrid is the clear focus, and the reappearance of her old flame creates both romantic and professional tension that is handled with adult restraint rather than soap-opera excess. Lloyd’s role as the non-field analyst forced into active pursuit adds texture, and the group dynamic among the Martini Club members remains one of the series’ pleasures. Jo Thibodeau continues to serve as a useful grounded counterpoint—the local law enforcement figure who knows the retirees are not ordinary citizens but still has to navigate official channels.

The Shadow Friends succeeds because it takes the premise of the Martini Club—competent, scarred people who thought they were done with the game—and forces them to confront how unfinished that game still is. It balances friendship, competence, and genuine danger without turning the characters into superheroes or the plot into pure nostalgia. Recommended for fans of spy fiction featuring older protagonists, dual timelines, and the uneasy intersection of personal history and professional duty.

Note: While putting together this review, I discovered a fourth novel in this series, The Italian Thriller (2028). I will definitely look forward to seeing what happens next to this crew. 

 

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#Review - The Enigma Challenge by S.C. Godfrey #Thriller

Series: Standalone
Format: 336 pages, Hardcover

Release Date: August 11, 2026
Publisher: Pamela Dorman Books
Source: Publisher
Genre: Thriller

Zoe Wilder has the unflashy, solitary life of an academic, studying ciphers in literature at a California university. When her research takes her to a cryptology conference in Madrid, she’s not expecting to trigger the Enigma Challenge, a clandestine puzzle competition few dare to enter.

The Enigma Challenge is an infamous competition with impossibly high stakes: Lose, and your identity is wiped forever. It doesn’t take long for Zoe to realize that she’s in over her head. Enter Dane Seaver: the mysterious hacker who insists they team up. Dane knows the Enigma Challenge—its secrets, its players—and Zoe knows ciphers. For better or worse, they need each other.

Six days, five puzzles, three countries, and innumerable rivals. What’s more, the spark of attraction between them becomes harder to ignore, but distractions are dangerous. With twelve million dollars and multiple lives on the line, the Enigma Challenge is anyone’s game. Will Zoe and Dane come out unscathed against the other players—and each other?

Story Locale: Madrid; Barcelona; Paris; Edinburgh

S.C. Godfrey’s The Enigma Challenge is a high-speed thriller that treats codebreaking as both the engine of the plot and the metaphor for a bad relationship. This one is designed as an action vehicle with an open-door love story bolted on, and that hybrid is both its selling point and the source of the split verdict. Zoe Wilder, a thirty-year-old postdoc who studies literary ciphers at the fictional Bay Area university Chessmont, arrives in Madrid for the International Conference on Cryptology to present a paper and to end things with Eric, her boyfriend and her boss. 

The conference is also the kickoff for the Enigma Challenge, a clandestine competition of five puzzles, a rumored multi-million-dollar purse ($12 million), and a penalty that makes ordinary defeat look mild: lose, and the organizers “delete” you—bank accounts, degrees, credit, identity, gone. Zoe solves the throwaway opening puzzle at the Ángel Caído in Retiro Park, the mass text goes out, and she is suddenly the target. She teams up with Dane Seaver, a previous two-time winner, hacker, academic bad boy, and the man Eric specifically told her to avoid. 

Six days, five ciphers, a route that runs Madrid–Barcelona–Paris–Edinburgh and on into the Scottish Highlands and Inverness, and a growing list of rivals who will threaten, attack, and kill to stay in the game. Godfrey has been frank about the lineage. The spark was not The Da Vinci Code but Kit Williams’s 1979 picture-puzzle book Masquerade, which she loved as a child; the ciphers themselves were built with the help of Elonka Dunin and Klaus Schmeh’s practical codebreaking guide, and Dunin reportedly solved the book’s puzzles on a Zoom call. That research shows. 

Zoe walks readers through Caesar, pigpen, Playfair, columnar transposition, and the rest, and the novel is written so you can try the puzzles or simply watch her solve them. Real sites—the fallen angel in Retiro, the cloisters of Barcelona Cathedral, Arthur’s Seat—are used as clue locations rather than postcard backdrops, which is one of the book’s cleaner pleasures. Once the challenge starts, the pair barely stop moving. Zoe is smart and spunky; Dane is abs with a vulnerable heart; the villains are extremely villainous. 

Godfrey has said the romance was written in service of the thriller, not the other way around, and that she did not hold back on either the sex scene or the violence. That matches the book’s self-description. The emotional through-line that actually works is Zoe’s exit from a toxic workplace relationship, and her inherited love of puzzles, shared with a late father. Dane functions more as a guide, bankroll, and romantic obstacle than as a fully independent mystery, at least until the late revelations the ending is built to protect. The last page is a deliberate cliffhanger. Godfrey has said the next book is not a direct sequel but another story in the same world, with related characters.

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#Review - Lost in the Dark by Debra Webb #Suspense #Thriller

Series: Standalone 
Format: 367 pages, Paperback
Release Date: June 9, 2026
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Source: Publisher
Genre: Thriller, Suspense

The brutal murder of her sister draws a woman back to her hometown and all its dark secrets in a gripping novel of suspense by USA Today bestselling author Debra Webb.

Dr. CJ Patterson returns to her Alabama hometown when her estranged sister, Shelley, is found murdered in the woods. For CJ it means diving headfirst into a painful life she left behind.

CJ reluctantly partners with Detective Kevin Braddock, and the complicated romantic history they share is far from over. They soon zero in on Shelley’s abusive ex-boyfriend and a local crime boss who controls the struggling mill village’s illicit enterprises. But anyone is suspect in a town with so many secrets. Even Shelley died with a few of her own.

As the investigation continues, so do the murders. One by one they’re leading CJ into a past she desperately fled from. CJ knows her hometown all too well. And that her search for the truth, and for a killer, will only get darker.

Lost in the Dark is Debra Webb’s 2026 revised edition of her 2009 novel Everywhere She Turns. The story is a dark small-town investigative thriller with romantic-suspense elements. The official premise is straightforward: Dr. CJ Patterson, an emergency-medicine resident in Baltimore, returns to her struggling Alabama mill-village hometown of Huntsville, Alabama, after her estranged sister Shelley is found murdered in the woods. She is pulled back into a world of poverty, drugs, prostitution, and buried family secrets she fled years earlier. 

CJ reluctantly works the case with Detective Kevin Braddock, a former romantic interest whose history with her is far from settled. Early suspects include Shelley’s abusive ex, Ricky Banks, and a local crime boss who treats the village as his personal fiefdom. Additional murders follow, each one dragging CJ deeper into the past she tried to escape. The story uses multiple points of view, with CJ’s as the primary lens. The setup is classic Webb territory: a protagonist forced to confront the place and people that shaped her, while a killer who seems to know her too well stays one step ahead. 

Once the body count rises and the investigation tightens, the suspense and sense of danger increase and several twists appear. CJ is driven, professionally capable, and carrying a heavy load of grief and unresolved family trauma. She is not always likable. Grief, guilt, and the investigation explain some of her sharper edges, but her choices—especially the speed with which the old attraction to Braddock reignites—have been a sticking point for some readers. One detailed review noted that the physical reunion happens very soon after she sees her sister’s body in the morgue, which undercut the emotional weight of the opening for that reader. 

Braddock functions as both professional partner and romantic counterpart. The supporting cast—family members, the crime boss’s circle, Shelley’s world—is populated by people who almost all have hidden agendas. Few characters are purely sympathetic, which fits the grim setting but can make the book feel emotionally chilly. The Alabama mill-village atmosphere—economic decline, illicit economies, the way everyone knows everyone else’s business—is convincingly drawn. 

The investigation structure gives the story forward momentum once it hits its stride, and the later chapters deliver the rising danger and twists that thriller readers expect. A dark, readable hometown-murder thriller with a complicated heroine and a polarizing romance. Recommended for Webb fans and readers who like their suspense dirty and their secrets ugly; approach with the expectation of graphic violence and an early physical reunion between the leads.

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#Review - The Girl in the Lake by Lauren Oliver #Mystery #Thriller

Series: Department of Unexplained Phenomena #1 

Format: 321 pages, Kindle Edition

Release Date: June 1, 2026
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Source: Kindle Unlimited
Genre: Mystery, Thriller

A young girl who claims to remember a past life draws a psychologist into a decades-old mystery in a haunting novel of suspense by New York Times bestselling author Lauren Oliver.

Kate Willis, consultant for the Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia, is tasked with interviewing six-year-old Henley Haskell about the girl’s alleged past-life recollections. The evaluation also marks a return for Kate to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and to troubling recollections of her own.

Here, twenty-four years ago, Kate’s friend Becca McGuire vanished from her bunk at a now-shuttered summer camp and was never seen again—presumably drowned in Lake Sauquamet. But the mystery of her disappearance is only deepening. Because Henley’s memories of her “other life” are ones that could only belong to Becca.

For Kate, Henley’s recurring, suffocating nightmares, and her disturbing illustrations of places she has never been, seem to spell out the unbelievable. Somewhere, somehow, the truth about what really happened to Becca is locked inside this little girl. As Henley’s uncanny memories surface, so do old secrets—each one drawing Kate inexorably back to that terrible long-ago summer by the lake.

The Girl in the Lake is Lauren Oliver’s adult-thriller debut and the first book in her Dept. of Unexplained Phenomenon series: a dual-timeline mystery that sits right on the fault line between skepticism and the uncanny. The story follows 40-year-old Kate Willis, a psychologist who consults for the University of Virginia’s real-life Division of Perceptual Studies. She is sent to Stockbridge, Massachusetts, to interview six-year-old Henley Haskell, who talks about an “other life” with startling specificity. 

The case pulls Kate back to the shuttered Camp Sauquamet and Lake Sauquamet, where her best friend, Becca McGuire, vanished at fourteen and was presumed drowned. Henley’s nightmares, drawings, and private details increasingly look like Becca’s. Kate’s job is to look for suggestion, family leakage, trauma, and fraud. The novel keeps asking whether Henley is a vessel, a child absorbing a story, or something messier than either explanation. Kate is a skeptic with a messy private life—work as armor, old drinking as another kind of burial, a return home that she has postponed for decades. 

She's complicated rather than heroic, and the plot only works because she has to test her own beliefs. The “Then” chapters are Oliver’s real advantage. Her YA background shows in the camp material: the Cat Pack’s shifting alliances, the cruelty of girlhood, the Gray Lady legend, secrets used as currency. Becca is not a sainted missing girl. She is magnetic, unstable, loyal, and dangerous in the way fourteen-year-olds can be when they collect other people’s weaknesses. That makes the present-day investigation feel like unfinished adolescence rather than a cold-case procedural. 

Atmosphere does a lot of the work. The Berkshires, the abandoned camp, Fair Isle, the lake, and the local ghost story give the book a damp, closed-in Gothic mood without abandoning a clinical present. Oliver researched children who report previous-life memories, and that grounding makes Henley’s details more unsettling than a straightforward haunting would. The best version of this book is not “reincarnation is real.” 

It is a story about memory as something the mind edits in order to survive, about group guilt, and about whether a landscape can hold what people refuse to say. The supernatural is allowed to breathe; it doesn't have to win the argument. Pacing is my biggest complaint. The first half and middle lean on interviews, verification, and circling the same questions—how does Henley know this, who told her, what is Kate willing to admit? If you want a mystery that stays foggy all the way through, the landing may feel a shade too assembled. 

Themes

• Memory as construction, not archive
• Secrets as power and as poison
• Skepticism as protection
• The exact moment play turns into culpability
• Whether a ghost is a spirit or a conscience that will not stay sunk

Pick this up if you like Lisa Jewell / Megan Miranda / Jennifer McMahon territory, Yellowjackets-adjacent summer-camp rot, or thrillers that flirt with the paranormal without fully converting. Skip it if you want a lean, twist-every-chapter thriller or a hard-commit ghost novel. This is a character-driven slow burn that becomes a rescue/reckoning, then leaves a door slightly open for the series. 

 

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#Review - You Know Why by J.T. Ellison #Mystery #Thriller

Series: Standalone
Format: 428 pages, Kindle Edition
Release Date: August 25, 2026
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Source: Kindle Unlimited
Genre: Mystery, Thriller

It’s the holidays, and photographer Brooklyn Locke is bound for Italy with her husband, Trey, and their two children. But when Trey vanishes from the airport, missing their connecting flight, their impromptu vacation—and life as she knows it—begins to unravel.

Desperate to find her husband, Brooklyn accepts help from a stranger on the same flight, Eden Barrow. But Eden soon makes a shocking claim. She is the sister of Trey’s first wife, and ten years ago he was the main suspect in her murder.

Struggling to comprehend these accusations, fate delivers one more a violent accident that leaves Brooklyn fighting for her life. With nowhere else to turn, Brooklyn leans on Eden for support. But each kindness feels too rehearsed, feeding her doubts about Eden’s motives and Trey’s true past.

Brooklyn has her own dark history she’d rather forget and confronts an unsettling possibility. Her life is not what it seems, and the truth is a trap—laid by someone waiting for the perfect time to strike.

You Know Why by J.T. Ellison is a domestic suspense psychological thriller that starts with a single, ordinary rupture and then keeps peeling until almost nothing about the family at the center of the story can be trusted. It is twisty, propulsive, and frequently stressful in the way a good airport-nightmare thriller should be. In its second half, it's also overstuffed. Main Characters include: Brooklyn Locke, Eden Barrow, Detective Theresa Lee, and Trey Locke.  

The official setup is clean and immediately effective. Photographer Brooklyn Locke, her husband Trey, and their two children are heading to Italy for a last-minute holiday trip when Trey vanishes during a connection and misses the next flight. A stranger on the same itinerary, Eden Barrow, offers help—and then drops a bomb. She says she is the sister of Trey’s first wife, and that ten years earlier Trey was the prime suspect in that woman’s murder. A violent accident then leaves Brooklyn fighting for her life and increasingly dependent on the one person she has every reason not to trust. Brooklyn, of course, has secrets of her own. 

Ellison opens a decade earlier, on a Christmas-night murder in Georgia that is staged against the most aggressively cozy holiday details imaginable: snow, a lighted tree, a pie in the oven, carols on a phone. That contrast is the book’s governing idea. The present-day plot then runs on dual (and sometimes more) points of view, short chapters, and a steady drip of withheld information. The reader often knows slightly more than Brooklyn does, which is both the engine of the suspense and the source of the book’s most common reader complaint: you will want to shake her.

The characters are built for suspicion rather than warmth. Brooklyn is a mother in freefall whose protectiveness of her children is the most emotionally grounded thing in the novel. Trey is the classic Ellison husband: charming, incomplete, and suddenly unreadable. Eden is the book’s most interesting creation—helpful in a way that feels rehearsed, grieving in a way that curdles into something possessive. Sisterhood is a recurring structural motif: Eden and the dead Chloe; Brooklyn and her twin, Margot. Ellison has said she is less interested in likability than in whether a character remains understandable and, at least sometimes, forgivable. That shows. Almost no one here is clean.

This book is about identity as a performance and marriage as a negotiated fiction. How much of a spouse do you actually know? How much of yourself have you edited out in order to keep a life intact? Holiday travel, airports, and the false intimacy of strangers in transit give those questions a physical setting. The novel also wants to be more than a “who did I marry?” story. It folds in a cold-case murder, shifting loyalties, and the aftereffects of trauma (including a traumatic brain injury that becomes both a plot device and a source of narrative unreliability). When those layers lock together, the book has the snap of a well-made trap. When they pile up, it starts to feel like three thrillers sharing one spine.

If you liked The Last Thing He Told Me, Gone Girl, or Ellison’s own It’s One of Us and A Very Bad Thing, this will likely hit the same nerve: marriage as a crime scene, identity as a moving target, a stranger who knows too much. Think of it as domestic noir with a travel-thriller chassis and a cold-case engine bolted on. It is not her leanest book, and it is not her most emotionally devastating. For long stretches, it is extremely hard to put down and ends on a mind-blowing finale. 

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#Review - Until She Dies by Kendra Elliot #Thriller #Suspense

Series: Noelle Marshall # 3
Format: 328 pages, Kindle Edition
Release Date: September 8, 2026
Publisher: Montlake Publishing
Source: Kindle Unlimited
Genre: Thriller, Suspense

Detective Noelle Marshall and FBI Agent Max Rhodes unearth bodies and secrets as they become targets of a serial killer in a chilling novel of suspense by a Wall Street Journal bestselling author.

When a search dog locates a mass burial ground in the Oregon forest, Detective Noelle Marshall is plunged into a hunt for a killer who’s hiding in plain sight. The key to her case lies in a decades-old secret: a lone survivor who escaped and is still out there, living in fear. The murderer is a phantom who left behind a collection of victims with nothing in common but their final resting place.

As pressure mounts to identify the bodies and find the killer, the investigation draws in FBI Agent Max Rhodes—Noelle’s partner in work and in life. They’ve hunted monsters before, but this one has spent years preparing for this moment, and he craves revenge. As the search narrows and the clock tightens, Noelle and Max must confront a predator who knows the terrain—and their weaknesses—better than they do.

Until She Dies is the third installment in author Kendra Elliot's Noelle Marshall series. It is a Pacific Northwest police procedural with romantic-suspense elements, a serial-killer investigation, and the emotional continuity that defines Elliot’s connected Oregon universe. Elliot is known for the Bone Secrets, Callahan & McLane, Mercy Kilpatrick, and Columbia River series. Noelle Marshall first appeared in the Columbia River books; fans asked for her own story, and this series delivers it while remaining set in the same Deschutes County world. 

Secondary characters from earlier books (including Mercy Kilpatrick, Truman Daly, and Rowan Wolff) can appear, so longtime readers will feel the continuity even if each novel works as a case-driven thriller. A search dog uncovers a mass burial site in the Oregon forest. Detective Noelle Marshall of the Deschutes County Sheriff’s Office takes the lead. The victims share almost nothing except their graves. The investigation points toward a killer who has operated for years, hidden in plain sight, and a decades-old secret: one person escaped and has been living in fear ever since. 

FBI Agent Max Rhodes—Noelle’s partner both professionally and personally—joins the case. Pressure mounts as bodies are identified and the killer’s pattern becomes clearer. This predator has spent years preparing, knows the terrain, and specifically targets the investigators. The hunt turns personal. Noelle Marshall remains the series’ emotional center. She is a competent detective still carrying the trauma of her politician husband’s murder years earlier (the subject of Her First Mistake) and the secrets she kept about that night.

By book three, she has built a life and a partnership with Max, but the new case tests both her professional judgment and the fragile trust she has constructed with the FBI and her own family. Max Rhodes functions as both investigative counterpart and romantic anchor. Elliot typically writes these pairings as grounded rather than overheated: two professionals who respect each other’s competence while the case forces them into greater vulnerability. Readers who follow the series will see the relationship evolve under pressure rather than reset. 

Supporting characters like Ollie, Emma, and the Oregon law-enforcement community give the book its procedural texture. Elliot’s strength has always been making the team feel like people who have history with one another, not just plot devices. Investigations proceed through interviews, forensics, search-and-rescue work, and the slow identification of remains. Tension builds as facts accumulate and the sense grows that the killer is watching. You can start here, but you will miss emotional context around Noelle’s marriage, the earlier murder case, and how she and Max reached their current partnership.

The first two books—Her First Mistake (2025) and No One Knew (January 2026)—are the better entry points. The subject matter is dark: serial murder, hidden graves, a survivor living in prolonged fear, and investigators who become prey. Readers who want lighter romantic suspense or a guaranteed uplifting ending may find the tone heavier than expected. If you already like Noelle and Max, this installment continues their story while giving them a large, threatening case. If you are new to Elliot, start with Her First Mistake or one of the Mercy Kilpatrick/Columbia River books to see whether her blend of investigation, trauma, and relationship work clicks for you.

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