Thrillers to read now — or in the near future

New first-rate mysteries and thrillers are on their way, Richard Lipez writes.

The Cook of the Halcyon

Andrea Camilleri

Before he died in 2019 at 93, novelist and film director Andrea Camilleri wrote in an author's note that he had adapted the 27th Inspector Salvo Montalbano mystery from an unproduced screenplay. That novel, The Cook of the Halcyon, despite a bloody shootout in the final chapters, is more Buster Keaton than Quentin Tarantino. What makes it especially worth reading — and essential for fans of the series — is the chance to watch the Sicilian food-obsessed, endearingly cranky Montalbano grapple with an international drug cartel, an exasperating Italian law enforcement bureaucracy and the atrocious cooking of his beloved girlfriend, Livia. He survives all three, if just barely.

The Postscript Murders Elly Griffiths

“I don't want to be rude … but I think you've been reading too many crime novels,” a snarky panellist at a book festival advises three jaunty amateur sleuths in the second Detective Sergeant Harbinder Kaur mystery. (The first, The Stranger Diaries, won an Edgar in 2020.) Kaur, who calls herself “the Best gay Sikh Detective in West Sussex” is just one of a delightful cast of characters who could be out of an old Ealing comedy like The Lavender Hill Mob. There are echoes of Dame Agatha, too, when the first of several murder victims in this droll romp is a latter-day Miss Marple. The Washington Post

Dark Sky C.J. Box

Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett, the likable great-outdoors crime solver, is so techno-out-of-it, his daughters kid him about texting “in complete sentences.” So there's irony aplenty when Pickett, at the governor's request, takes a snotty Silicon Valley billionaire nicknamed Steve-2 (after Jobs) elk hunting. Attacked by sadistic rustics with a social media gripe, the owner of the Facebook-like Confab tells Pickett that if he dies in the wilderness at least “it'll go viral.”