G. Robert Frazier

From the outset, it’s clear that young Maggie knows more than she’s saying about her cousin Charisse’s disappearance and murder in Valerie Nieman’s coming of age/suspense thriller In the Lonely Backwater.

Don Winslow draws on Homer’s Iliad to craft a modern-day crime classic pitting Irish and Italian American mob families against each other in 1980s Rhode Island. Winslow will discuss City on Fire at Parnassus Books in Nashville on May 3.

There is twice the action at hand for fans of Mark Greaney’s Gray Man as the covert operative chases down a ghost from his past in the new thriller Sierra Six. Greaney will celebrate the launch of Sierra Six at Novel in Memphis on February 19.

In Patricia Cornwell’s Autopsy, Dr. Kay Scarpetta must determine whether a pair of astronauts were killed by possible space debris that ripped through their satellite or by a surviving astronaut. To do so, she must remotely navigate a rescue team through a pair of autopsies in space. Zoom anyone?

In Erin A. Craig’s second YA thriller, a growing sense of unease slowly envelops the community of Amity Falls. Crops turn bad. Supplies disappear. Bizarre creatures are seen in the dark. And irrational suspicions among the village’s citizens threaten to disrupt the status quo. Young Ellerie Downing may be the only one to save them all, if she can only get past her own doubts and fears.