Crime fiction roundup

“Yesterday” by Felicia Yap, Mulholland, 400 pages, $27

In the alternative dimension of “Yesterday,” the world consists of Duos, people who have two days of short-term memory, and Monos, a persecuted minority who can remember only as far back as yesterday. To keep track of their lives, everyone must rely on the iDiary, on which they record their daily histories. “You know you were happy only afterwards,” says noted Duo novelist and aspiring Parliamentarian Mark Henry Evans. After the body of his mistress, Sophia, is pulled from the river near his home in eastern England, he swears he had nothing to do with her death. But Evans’ Mono wife, Claire, isn’t so sure. Nor is the cop bent on solving the murder before the clock strikes tomorrow.

To tantalizing degrees, Yap reinvents the unreliable narrator by ingeniously weaving together true, imagined and fabricated back stories. Her debut is told from four perspectives, including that of the victim through her “revenge journal.” Was Sophia, institutionalized for many years, delusional in stating she possessed full memory? Her moving observation that “it’s the sum total of minuscule remembered gestures that makes love powerful” inspires regret that she’s no longer around to prove her shocking claim. “The Blinds” by Adam Sternbergh, Ecco, 400 pages, $26.99

Lost memories of a very different sort are at the heart of “The Blinds,” the latest novel by the author of “Shovel Ready.” In it, participants in an experimental witness-protection-type program in a tiny, isolated county in Texas have had their brains scrubbed, leaving them with no knowledge of who they were or what they did. That’s saying something, considering many of them were killers, rapists and child abusers.

Bearing new names taken from lists of Hollywood stars and U.S. vice presidents, the nearly 50 residents are shut off from the outside world. There is no internet or cellphone service. All is relatively peaceful until a suicide and murder shock the town and a resident’s coydogs — dogs crossed with coyotes — are set on fire. Sheriff Calvin Cooper assures everyone he’ll get to the bottom of the freakish violence, but he knows more than he’s letting on. As in “Westworld,” an outside company is pulling lethal strings. And as in “The Leftovers,” the fate of a single mother (with whom Cooper has a past) hangs in the balance.

Sternbergh cheats on his premise: Wouldn’t violent impulses continue to spring from the DNA of bad characters even after their memories are expunged? But “The Blinds” is so wickedly entertaining, we don’t much care. “Parting Shot” by Linwood Barclay, Doubleday Canada, 464 pages, $27

A series of killings, many resulting from the poisoning of the town water supply in Lincoln Barclay’s previous novel, “The Twenty-Three,” haunt the village of Promise Falls. But for police detective Barry Duckworth and private investigator Cal Weaver, there’s no time to mourn. Two local men have been targeted by a vigilante website called Just Desserts. One of them is 18-year-old Jeremy Pilford, widely ridiculed on social media as “The Big Baby” after not being prosecuted for drunkenly running over a woman with a car because he was too pampered to know he was doing something wrong. And in a case of mistaken abduction, 20something Brian Gaffney wanders into town in a daze after being missing for two days, with no knowledge of why a murder confession was crudely tattooed on his back.

As Duckworth and Weaver unravel their respective mysteries, they find themselves working through issues involving their own sons. The family theme is in play in other ways, some creepy and some affecting. But “Parting Shot,” one of the best entries in Barclay’s “Promise Falls” series, never bogs down in sentiment. It’s too busy springing plot turns.