Thrillers Spiked With Terror, Dread and Melancholy

These books come in several shades of fear. Two are about missing women and the sisters desperate to find them, and the third features a strange invention that preys on people’s tenderest thoughts of the past.

Like her debut novel, “A Crooked Tree,” Una Mannion’s new book, TELL ME WHAT I AM (Harper, 277 pp., $30), is as much the story of a girl’s coming-of-age as it is a mystery. Its biggest shock comes at the beginning, when Deena Garvey, a 30-year-old nurse who has recently separated from her creepy, gaslighting husband, Lucas, leaves home in Philadelphia but never arrives at work.

What happened? Nessa, her sister, is sure that Lucas is responsible, particularly because he’s been maneuvering to gain custody of their 4-year-old daughter, Ruby. But there’s not much Nessa can do. When the case goes cold, Lucas takes Ruby to rural Vermont and cuts off all contact with Deena’s family.

The years pass; still no news. The repercussions of this loss — not just for the motherless Ruby, but also for Nessa, who puts her life on hold in the service of her sister’s case — are the focus of this quietly powerful novel. Questions swirl around the unpleasant Lucas. He may be controlling and overly strict, an authority-hating gun nut who forbids his daughter to ask questions about her mother, but is he a murderer?

Readers hoping for lurid drama and improbable plot twists won’t find them here, although the story accelerates (perhaps a bit abruptly) toward the end. But it’s a compelling portrait of a fractured family and a sister’s never-ending search for justice. Sometimes the truth takes a long time to reveal itself.

Catherine Ryan Howard’s tense THE TRAP (Blackstone, 263 pp., $26.99) is set in eastern Ireland, where Nicki O’Sullivan is one of several women who have vanished in the past few years. Her sister, Lucy, can’t stop her restless search for answers, even though the police don’t seem particularly interested. It’s been more than a year, and the world “wasn’t designed for people with open wounds,” Lucy thinks.

Then someone finds a bloody bra belonging to one of the missing women inside a purse at a charity shop, and the dying victim of a car accident claims that she has escaped from a house in which several others are imprisoned. Is there a connection?

Howard, the author of the wonderful “56 Days,” set during the pandemic lockdown in Dublin in 2020, has sentences that unspool like silk and a sly gift for misdirection. She disorients the reader by carefully withholding details and using sleight-of-hand chronological tricks. Again and again, you’ll blithely follow her down the wrong path.

You have to work to keep up with the different narrative perspectives. Steel yourself. Early in the book, an unnamed man driving a car — presumably the suspect in the case — muses aloud about how much he enjoys kidnapping women. “Are you even listening to me back there?” he says to his unnamed passenger. “If you can’t stop screaming, I’m going to have to make you.”

Random objects are inexplicably appearing in the English countryside: a Cabbage Patch Kid, a ticket to a 1982 production of the play “The Philadelphia Story” and, even odder, a simulacrum of a classic American diner — but without food or running water — plunked in an empty field.

It seems that the American military has developed a terrifying substance, code-named Prophet, with a startling property: It induces physical manifestations of its subjects’ nostalgia — imperfect copies of things they once cherished. Sadly for its victims, Prophet also addles their brains and often kills them.

PROPHET (Grove, 468 pp., $29) is a sui generis and rather wonderful collaboration between Helen MacDonald, known for her memoir “H Is for Hawk,” and the Irish writer Sin Blaché. Part science fiction, part buddy-investigator procedural, part I don’t even know how to describe it, it takes us on a trippy journey from a U.S. military base in England to the Colorado Desert, where an even more alarming accrual of objects beckons in a facility stacked with the corpses of the recently nostalgic.

The best part of the book is the sweetly complicated relationship at its center, between a bickering Scully-and-Mulderesque pair of operatives hired to investigate. One is Lt. Col. Adam Rubenstein, a repressed, by-the-book American intelligence agent. The other is Sunil Rao, an MI6 agent with an anger-management problem and an uncanny ability to ferret out fake things: forged art (he once worked for Sotheby’s), lying enemy combatants or, in this case, objects that are not what they appear to be. For some lucky reason, both seem largely immune to the effects of Prophet.

The ancillary characters are less memorable and the plot, peppered with flashbacks, is sometimes needlessly convoluted. But boy, is it interesting to watch Rubenstein and Rao grapple with the mysteries around them.

“His skin itches with wrongness,” the authors write, as Rao enters the ersatz diner. “But warring with the wrongness is a surge of elation running up his spine.”

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Sarah Lyall is a writer at large, working for a variety of desks including Sports, Culture, Media and International. Previously she was a correspondent in the London bureau, and a reporter for the Culture and Metro desks. More about Sarah Lyall

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