New Thrillers Out This Month
Two of my favorite series have new installments this month: Elise Hart Kipness's Kate Green Mysteries and Joanna Schaffhausen's Detective Annalisa Vega series.
Close Call by Elise Hart Kipness
Just in time for the US Open, Kate Green is back and caffeinated as ever! The third in Kipness’s series about Kate, a sports reporter who is drawn to trouble, is a Grand Slam (technically a three-quarter slam, but the next installment will undoubtedly right that!)
The book opens with Kate preparing a television special covering two American tennis players who could win the US Open: Lucy Bosco, the favorite, a ten-time Grand Slam winner, who, rumors speculate, may retire; and Brynn Cole, a teenager with a lot of buzz surrounding her. But when one of the players withdraws and another player receives a texted photo of the withdrawn player bound and gagged with a ransom request, Kate turns to her previously estranged father, Liam, to help her find the kidnapped woman.
The plot is full of more twists in direction than the Steffi Graf/Monica Seles US Open Finals match, and the pacing is faster than a serve by Andy Roddick. If you love tennis, sports or, just coffee and thrillers, you will love Close Call. While it is part of a series, you can read it as a stand-alone. But if you do, you’ll be clicking “buy” on the first two installments, Lights Out and Dangerous Play.
Close Call is out August 19. 2025.
Thank you to NetGalley and Thomas & Mercer for the opportunity to read an advance review copy.
Gone in the Night by Joanna Schaffhausen
Annalisa Vega, now a private investigator, is heavily pregnant and plagued with guilt about having chosen to send her brother to prison, where he will miss out on all of the events of his young daughters’s lives. So when Alex calls her from prison to ask her to help out a fellow inmate, Anna feels some obligation to consider the assignment. But the more she investigates the other man’s innocence of murder, the more she starts to question what she is learning.
As always, Schaffhausen throws her characters into thorny situations involving loyalty, revenge and forgiveness, with spectacular consequences. Taught and propulsive, the plot hooked me from the start. I raced through the twists I didn’t see coming. Five out of five stars!
Gone in the Night is out August 12, 2025.
Thank you to NetGalley and Minotaur Books for the opportunity to read an advance review copy.