Holiday book gift guide: Mysteries/thrillers

American Assassin

A Novel

Vince Flynn

Atria, $27.99

A tale from CIA superagent Mitch Rapp’s earliest days — his athletic background and covert training prepare him to take aim after a terrorist act devastates his family.

Broken

A Novel

Karin Fossum

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $25

A crime novelist is haunted by one of her characters, a neurotic loner who pleads for fair treatment and gets entangled with a damaged young woman.

Collusion

A Novel

Stuart Neville

Soho Crime, $25

Neville returns to the tangled, violent world of Northern Ireland introduced in “The Ghosts of Belfast,” but shifts from following a former IRA hitman to a detective inspector facing a far-reaching conspiracy.

The Damage Done

A Novel

Hilary Davidson

Forge, $24.99

Where’s Lily’s sister? Lily goes on a search after a dead girl found in a bathtub turns out to be an impostor using Lily’s sister’s identity.

The Confession

A Novel

John Grisham

Doubleday, $28.95

Travis Boyette is a brutal killer who watched prosecutors convict the wrong man. Now, with his own time running out, he wants to convince authorities that they are about to execute an innocent person.

Dead or Alive

A Novel

Tom Clancy with Grant Blackwood

Putnam, $28.95

Jack Ryan Jr. and his colleagues are hot on the trail of a cruel killer known as the Emir, considered the world’s most dangerous terrorist.

Edge

Jeffery Deaver

Simon & Schuster, $26.99

A deadly game of cat-and-mouse: Corte, a federal protection officer, is assigned to guard a D.C. cop from the same for-hire “lifter” who killed someone close to him.

The Einstein Enigma

A Novel

José Rodrigues dos Santos

William Morrow, $25.99

David Ben-Gurion pays a call to Albert Einstein in 1951. The conversation? Nuclear weapons and God. Fast-forward to the present and a newly discovered Einstein document that could either prove God’s existence or give Iran the bomb.

Hell’s Corner

A Novel

David Baldacci

Grand Central, $27.99

John Carr, a.k.a. Oliver Stone, hopes this is his last mission as an assassin as he stands in Lafayette Park across the street from the White House. Then a bomb — aimed at the president and the British prime minister — explodes and Carr is tasked with finding the terrorists.

Hell Gate

A Novel

Linda Fairstein

Dutton, $26.95

New York City Asst. District Attorney Alexandra Cooper finds links between two seemingly unrelated cases: a ship involved in the sex trade and a politician’s car accident.

Hollywood Hills

A Novel

Joseph Wambaugh

Little, Brown, $26.99

“Hollywood Nate” Weiss has agreed to watch the home of a B-list director with some A-list problems, including a fiancée who can’t keep her hands off of Nate and a butler who will help a no-good art dealer plan a major heist.

Hypothermia

A Novel

Arnaldur Indridason

Minotaur, $24.99

From Iceland’s most popular novelist comes the latest for Reykjavik police detective and loner Erlendur, who revisits his own personal tragedies while investigating a suspicious suicide and several decades-old disappearances.

The Killer of Little Shepherds

A True Crime Story and the Birth of Forensic Science

Douglas Starr

Alfred A. Knopf, $26.95

An account of a 19th century serial killer in the French countryside who inspired the verse “The werewolf of legends/Has now been surpassed.”

Kind of Blue

A Novel

Miles Corwin

Oceanview, $25.95

A former L.A. detective rejoins the force to hunt the killer of a legendary cop and settle an old score.

A Lily of the Field

A Novel

John Lawton

Atlantic Monthly, $24

In World War II Europe, a young musician from Vienna and a Hungarian physicist are unwittingly caught up on opposing sides as Lawton ushers them through Vienna, London and the U.S.

The Midnight Show Murders

A Novel

Al Roker and Dick Lochte

Delacorte, $26

Did you think Al only handled weather? In this, his second Billy Blessing novel with Dick Lochte, celebrity chef and reluctant detective Blessing agrees to be the sidekick on a new late-night television show, but the host is killed during the debut.

The Millennium Trilogy

Deluxe boxed set

Stieg Larsson

Alfred A. Knopf, $99

This slip-cased edition of the three “Girl Who” thrillers includes a fourth book: “On Stieg Larsson,” a collection of essays about Larsson that also features his correspondence.

Moonlight Mile

A Novel

Dennis Lehane

William Morrow, $26.99

It’s déjà vu all over again as two of Lehane’s most popular characters, Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro, investigate the disappearance of a now-teenage girl who had been kidnapped and found years ago.

Our Kind of Traitor

A Novel

John le Carré

Viking, $27.95

A Russian money-launderer and a bored Oxford don are the key players in a return to top form by the living master of espionage fiction.

Port Mortuary

A Scarpetta Novel

Patricia Cornwell

Putnam, $27.95

Kay Scarpetta’s enjoying a stint studying CT-assisted autopsy until a corpse is found that’s too close for comfort to the Cambridge Forensic Center, which she now heads.

The Prostitutes’ Ball

A Novel

Stephen J. Cannell

St. Martin’s, $25.99

The LAPD’s Shane Scully is back investigating a grisly triple homicide that draws him into the world of high-priced call girls and wealthy, violent power players in this latest from Cannell, who died in September.

The Reversal

A Novel

Michael Connelly

Little, Brown, $27.99

LAPD Detective Harry Bosch and longtime defense attorney Mickey Haller join forces to get justice for a dead girl’s family after DNA evidence reverses a conviction in a 24-year-old case.

Santa Fe Edge

A Novel

Stuart Woods

Putnam, $25.95

Attorney Ed Eagle looks into the puzzling murder of a golfer’s wife.

Spies of the Balkans

A Novel

Alan Furst

Random House, $26

Set in northeastern Greece before the Nazi invasion in the spring of 1941, this spy saga is Furst’s 11^th in a kind of series that breathes fresh vitality into the genre.

The Templar Salvation

A Novel

Raymond Khoury

Dutton, $26.95

A madman bent on destroying Western civilization needs a trove of texts hidden by a Templar knight. “The Last Templar’s” Tess Chaykin and Sean Reilly are back, trying to find the texts first.

Velocity

A Karen Vail Novel

Alan Jacobson

Vanguard Press, $25.95

While on a vacation in the Napa Valley, FBI profiler Karen Vail joins the hunt for a serial killer but the case turns personal when her lover Det. Robby Hernandez goes missing.

Worth Dying For

A Reacher Novel

Lee Child

Delacorte, $28

Ex-military cop Jack Reacher is on his way to Virginia but stops to take on the bad guys in a Nebraska farming community. Have pity on the cornhuskers.

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