‘Am I Bitter or Am I Sweet? Ladies Can Be Either.’

There’s a ghastly undercurrent of dread operating by way of Simone St. James’s THE BOOK OF COLD CASES (Berkley, 341 pp., $27), and it’s not due to the ghostly presence that flits out and in of the narrative.

Shea Collins — receptionist by day, true-crime blogger by night time — has lengthy been obsessive about Beth Greer, who was acquitted, as a younger girl, of the grisly murders of two males of their small Oregon city. (A observe left at one of many crime scenes stated: “Am I bitter or am I candy? Girls could be both.”) Collins hopes that Greer would possibly discuss to her although she’s by no means granted an interview about what occurred, or didn’t occur, all these years in the past. When, after an opportunity assembly in a health care provider’s workplace, Greer does agree to take a seat down with Collins, it turns into clear that each ladies have a really darkish connection to the crimes.

You most likely received’t guess what it’s, although; St. James is especially gifted at doling out twists.

Studying Josh Weiss’s debut novel appears like using shotgun with a buddy who’s driving expertly by way of a winter storm. How does he keep away from spinning out on the freeway as he dodges one treacherous pothole after one other? And the way does he make it to his last vacation spot with out as soon as white-knuckling it?

In BEAT THE DEVILS (Grand Central, 356 pp., $28), Weiss has crafted a hard-boiled alternate American historical past, circa 1958. Joseph McCarthy is president, Walter Cronkite and John Huston have each been murdered, Elizabeth “Black Dahlia” Brief may be very a lot alive (and a love curiosity), and the Home Un-American Actions Committee has morphed right into a not-so-secret police pressure. (In Los Angeles, the Echo Park library department has been become their detention heart, “a spot the place suspected Communists and deviants have been taken to be processed, interrogated and, in some circumstances, unofficially disposed of.”) Paranoia is at a fever pitch. The L.A.P.D. detective Morris Baker, staving off reminiscences of Holocaust horrors, should work out who killed the journalist and the movie director, at the same time as he turns into a goal of the identical plot.

The entire time, I anticipated the novel to devolve into kitsch because the variety of pulp tropes — together with, in fact, a femme fatale with layers of secrets and techniques — started to multiply. However Weiss creates palpable emotional depth, significantly for Baker, whose yearslong tactic of burying trauma has stopped working.