Summer reads

Killer thrillers: From an art-world conspiracy to a campus murder to the gripping tale of a missing child, these recommendations will add suspense to your beach book list.

By Laura Miller and Louis Bayard

Read more: Books, Laura Miller, Mysteries, Books Features, Louis Bayard, Summer Reads

May 26, 2008 | Memorial Day brings the promise of summer: languorous days spent lounging at the beach or by the air conditioner with the perfect page-turner. A mesmerizing potboiler, a heady historic tome, a gripping memoir -- you want a book that transports you to exotic places without making you go through airport security. You want something you can really sink your teeth into, but that won't leave you feeling overstuffed. In the coming weeks, Salon's staff will recommend a selection of summer reads -- mysteries, chick lit, memoirs and fiction with a historical twist.

This week's focus is thrillers: a suburban family is menaced by shady secrets and unexpected dangers; an art forger gets sucked into a bizarre conspiracy; a Stalin-era communist apparatchik seeks to redeem himself by uncovering a crime; an enigmatic college professor asks his class to unravel a hypothetical (or is it?) murder; and a divorcee becomes a mother-avenger as she searches for her missing teenage daughter.

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"Hold Tight"
By Harlan Coben

Like the hit men he portrays with such relish, Harlan Coben collects his contract and goes about his business with a minimum of fuss -- and he gets the job done every time. Not that he earns much love from the critical intelligentsia, but for his millions of acolytes, the effect of reading a Coben book is to resent anything that stops you from completing it. Had a rough day, honey? Tough shit. You want me to eat dinner? I'm on a diet. Kids killing each other? Call me when someone's bleeding.

And indeed, someone is always bleeding in Harlan Coben land, a white upper-middle-class suburban enclave menaced by the World Without. Coben's particular suspense turf is the imperiled family, and the clan that lies at the center of "Hold Tight" has more than its share of trouble -- though the full extent of it doesn't become clear until Mike and Tia Baye install spy software on their son's computer. Adam is a 16-year-old goth with the expected attitude and some unexpected secrets, as his parents learn when they find an instant message advising him to "just stay quiet and all safe."

"What would Adam need to stay quiet about in order to be safe?" his mother wonders, but Adam doesn't stick around long enough to answer, and in the course of tracking him down, his parents learn that he's mixed up in the suicide of his best friend, Spencer, and in the shady doings of a teen-oriented club in the Bronx that may be offering a bit more than alcohol-free entertainment. And the Bayes aren't the only ones having a bad week. Their next-door neighbor has just learned that her dying son was fathered by someone other than her husband, and a psychopathic killer named Nash is, for mysterious reasons, dragging suburban moms into his van and pulverizing them.

Kidnapping, rape, Internet cabals, kids with drugs, kids with guns: Coben's work might be accused of playing too ardently on the fears of the soccer-mom demographic, but he gives his families enough gumption to fight through their various terrors and enough layers to make you care about whether or not they end up in someone's nasty white van with tinted windows. And if "Hold Tight" is forced to fall back on coincidence to tie up its loose threads, it nevertheless gives readers all the assets we've come to expect from Coben: killer pace, stripped-down prose that never overreaches itself, and a conservative and abiding belief in the family structure, even -- make that especially -- at its most fragile. Formula this may be, but nobody cooks up the ingredients better. -- Louis Bayard

Next page: Our next pick: A masterly tale of a disillusioned artist sucked into a dangerous conspiracy