Get Lost by Justin Halpern

Published by Grand Central Publishing/Cardinal on July 7, 2026

Get Lost is consistently amusing and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny. That makes it a perfect beach read.

Mattie Wilkerson hated Los Armarios. She lived and worked and raised a daughter in the small California town, but every now and then Mattie disappeared. She always came back, but her daughter, Lila Dixon, often worried that Mattie wouldn’t return.

Lila’s father, John Dixon (known to all as “Dix”), loves Los Armarios. He played high school baseball there. He bought a house there right after he signed a minor league contract. He didn’t make it to the majors — in fact, he served time in prison — but he still enjoys the life of a small-town hero.

Dix wasn’t a great husband to Mattie and hasn’t been a good father to Lila, but he persuaded a friend to give Lila a job scouting high school baseball players. Lila hates the job but, to be fair, Lila hates pretty much everything about her life. She’s always hated getting calls when her mother disappears but has always dutifully traveled back to Los Armarios to await her return.

The story begins when Lila’s boss, Arturo Jimenez, calls Lila to tell her that her mother is missing. Lila is unconcerned because Mattie goes missing all the time. Arturo gets her attention by telling her that he learned about Mattie from Dix. When Lila points out that her father hasn’t spoken to her mother in twenty years and asks how Dix knows she’s missing, Arturo explains that Dix called him from jail and that the cops think he killed Mattie.

Lila drives to Los Armarios, where Sheriff John Bonsall tells her that video footage shows Lila’s mother entering her apartment building but no footage shows her leaving. All the windows in her apartment were locked from the inside and a security chain was on her door. Bonsall used to drop in on her to perform an informal wellness check from time to time, and he saw her there a day after she entered the building. The video showed her father entering the apartment building for ten minutes the following day. The day after that, a neighbor reported her missing. So how did she leave the building without being captured by the camera?

Lila is convinced that her mother is fine, but she devotes the rest of the novel to finding an answer to that question. She also interacts (reluctantly) with her father, who is soon released from jail for lack of evidence that he did anything to cause Lila’s disappearance.

Is Mattie alive? Lila receives a text message, purportedly from Mattie, that claims Lila’s investigation is making her unsafe. She also receives threats telling her to back off. Her investigation uncovers a large deposit to Mattie’s bank account and a large disbursement to a suspicious charity a few days later. The story turns Lila into an amateur detective as she tries to solve the riddle of her missing mother.

Many of the story’s laughs come from Dix’s attempts to convince Lila that he isn’t as bad as she thinks he is, followed by Lila providing copious evidence of his poor parenting skills and bad character. Lila’s long-held anger is easy to understand and may explain why she is so miserable. Yet Lila isn’t such a disagreeable character that readers will be disinclined to spend time with her.

Justin Halpern’s portrayal of Dix as a charming conman who lives in the memory of his past glories — enabled by townies who bask in the glow of his minor league celebrity — is consistently funny. Halpern could have ruined the story with a sappy reconciliation, but he makes the wise choice to sprinkle in a heartwarming moment or two, raising the possibility that with a lot of effort by both Lila and Dix, they might avoid being estranged for the rest of their lives. How that will work out is left to the reader’s imagination.

Lila eventually devises a theory that explains how the money that entered and left Mattie’s account might relate to her mother’s disappearance. By the end of the story, she also tumbles upon an explanation for the locked room mystery. The explanation comes with a reveal. As tradition dictates, a character who isn’t an obvious suspect turns out to be at the heart of the mystery.

Get Lost works well enough as a light mystery, but its value lies in the family dynamic between Lila and Dix. In addition to providing a vehicle for the comedy that poor parent-child relationships can inspire, the hope that the father and daughter might find a way to reconnect, that Lila might find a way to forgive or at least accept Dix, adds a sweetness to the story that blends well with the novel’s mix of comedy and crime.

RECOMMENDED

Traitors by Robert McCaw

Published by W. W. Norton & Company on July 7, 2026

Traitors is set in a post-Trump world. The new president, Roger Clayton, is a Democrat. A coup in Russia has replaced Putin with an even more hardline dictator, one who plans to invade Finland despite Russia’s botched attempt to capture Ukraine.

Robert Cooper befriended Clayton as an undergraduate, wrote position papers for him during his campaign, and is now the deputy assistant attorney general for counterintelligence in the DOJ’s National Security Division. That’s a pretty good job, but Clayton is about to nominate Cooper to become the assistant attorney general in charge of the NSD.

Cooper’s nomination will be undermined by Alice Boufort, a DOJ employee with more seniority who feels entitled to the position by her obsession with defeating Russian spies, a quest born of her desire to avenge her father, who was tortured and killed by “communist agitators aligned with the Russian KGB.” Boufort has the ear of a key senator who believes the gossip she feeds him about Cooper’s unreliable job performance.

As the title implies, the plot concerns Russian sleeper agents who are positioned in the US government. There are too many of them to be credible, but implausibility didn’t stop Robert Ludlum from premising some pretty good thrillers on networks of traitors who conspire with foreign governments to overthrow the US.

Cooper learns about one of the sleeper agents from a Russian spy who wants to defect in exchange for protection and a new identity. While wary that the Russian spy might be a double agent feeding him disinformation, Cooper confirms that a congressman is feeding classified information to Russia. Unfortunately, the congressman is murdered before he can be arrested and interrogated.

The Russian spy has warned Cooper not to trust the FBI, so the person who leaked information leading to the congressman’s assassination seems to be positioned close to Cooper’s office. Cooper spends the novel tracking down the remaining four sleeper agents who have infected American government before they can carry out a nefarious scheme to shift American political power to isolationists who refuse to oppose Russia's power grabs. Russia believes the scheme will enable it to invade Finland without resistance by the US, NATO obligations notwithstanding.

The elements of a conventional conspiracy thriller are present in Traitors, but the story is formulaic. It’s Ludlum light. The novel checks off the expected plot points without the excitement or tension that a good spy novel should evoke. I attribute that failure to Robert McCaw’s dry, “just the facts” writing style. The novel is blurbed as an “edge of your seat” page turner, but my butt remained firmly positioned in the middle of my seat as I yawned between page turns.

Cooper is a straightlaced patriot, someone we would want to hold an intelligence position in the real world, but his absence of passion makes him a dull bureaucrat whose personality is noticeably absent. James Bond, Robert Cooper is not. Nor is he the exemplar of bureaucrats in the spy game, George Smiley. Bond had panache and Smiley had emotional depth. Cooper is more of a Joe Friday. He would have made a fine black-and-white television character in the 1950s, but he’s a bit of a bore compared to the spies that genre fans embrace.

The power struggle between Cooper and Boufort is only mildly interesting. I appreciated the depiction of Putin’s vulnerability to far-right actors in his country but never got the sense of a world on the edge of a world war. In the end, Traitors struck me as the outline of a thriller that others have already written, without the fleshed-out characters and plot twists that might have made the novel stand out among its peers.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

A Quiet Place by Seichō Matsumoto

First published in Japan in 1975; published in translation by Random House/Modern Library on July 14, 2026

Seichō Matsumoto began writing crime fiction in the late 1940s. He is best known as the author of Tokyo Express. He died in 1992.

A Quiet Place exemplifies the quiet storytelling of classic crime fiction. Modern Japanese mystery writers seem to have maintained that tradition, while modern American crime novels are usually driven by action, violence, and pace. Readers have their preferences, but I suspect that many fans of crime fiction consider both approaches to have their merits.

The protagonist of A Quiet Place is Tsuneo Asai, a career civil servant who lives and works in Tokyo. He is “immensely proud of being section chief at the Ministry of Agriculture.” Asai is particularly knowledgeable about meat products and is often asked to lecture or participate in workshops at farming villages and gatherings of meat producers.

Asai is on a business trip in Kobe, assisting the new director general of his ministry, when he learns that his wife has died. A caller tells him that Eiko died from a heart attack in the Sanya district of Yoyogi. Asai knew that Eiko had a weak heart but is surprised by her death because she took care to avoid overstimulation.

Asai makes his apologies and rushes back to Tokyo. He learns that Eiko collapsed outside a cosmetics boutique. The shopkeeper, Chiyoko Takahashi, summoned a nearby doctor, but Eiko died before the doctor arrived. The time of death was furnished by Takahashi, but Asai later suspects that her account of events was not accurate.

Asai is puzzled by the details of Eiko’s death. What was Eiko doing in the Yoyogi neighborhood? She did not work, but she often went out during the day to pursue a hobby — most recently, to gain inspiration for her poetry and to meet with other haiku enthusiasts. Did some local attraction draw her to this particular area?

Matsumoto develops Asai’s character in depth, including his impressions of Eiko. Because of her heart condition — or because Asai spends most of his waking moments thinking about his career — Asai and Eiko rarely had sex. Asai had gotten used to abstinence and assumed that Eiko simply lacked sexual interest in him. He now recalls the time Eiko asked him if she was sexy, a question supposedly inspired by a girlfriend who told her that a new outfit made her look appealing. Asai realized for the first time that Eiko was sexy but it didn’t occur to him that she might return another man’s interest.

It’s telling that Asai discovers so much about his wife after her death. Because he was so devoted to his work and shared few interests with her, he didn’t realize that she was acclaimed in the local haiku community for the elegance of her poems. He had no idea that so many people valued her for her kindness. He barely noticed her and was unaware that others admired her feminine appearance. The story might be seen as a cautionary tale for men who are so wrapped up in their careers that they take their wives for granted.

Asai decides to visit the location of Eiko’s death, in part to satisfy his curiosity, but also to thank Takahashi for helping his wife. He is surprised that the shop is on a hill since Eiko usually avoided walking uphill. Asai interrogates the shopkeeper and the doctor, then wanders through the neighborhood before he spots two nearby love hotels. He begins to wonder whether Eiko was meeting another man. To investigate that suspicion, Asai shows Eiko’s picture to maids at the love hotels, but none of them recognize her as a guest.

Asai's suspicions grow when, months later, a new love hotel appears at the site formerly occupied by the cosmetics shop. Asai hires an investigator who provides details of the hotel's ownership. The details allow Asai to hypothesize a complex chain of events surrounding Eiko's death.

For much of the novel, it isn’t clear why this is a crime novel. Eiko seems to have suffered a natural death, even if her location and behavior on the date of her death seems suspicious. Only after Asai finally stumbles upon the truth does a crime occur. I’ll leave it to the reader to discover the nature of that crime and its impact on Asai.

A Quiet Place tells a quiet story, but its gentle nature — at least until a violent moment occurs near the end — does not deprive the story of its dramatic tension. I admired Matsumoto’s ability to transform a boring character — a man whose life is devoted to statistics and government regulations — into a husband who is tormented, first by the mystery of his wife’s death and later by the crime that eventually occurs.

The story is blurbed as a psychological thriller, and while it doesn’t feature the action that characterizes modern thrillers, the psychological impact of events on Asai’s life makes it possible for the reader to empathize with his plight, or at least to pity him for his faults. Japanese crime fiction that makes it into an English translation is almost always worth reading, and A Quiet Place is a quiet example of crime fiction that avoids formulaic storytelling by focusing on human responses to unexpected events.

RECOMMENDED

The Faith of Beasts by James S.A. Corey

Published by Orbit on April 14, 2026

The Faith of Beasts is the second novel in The Captive’s War series, following The Mercy of Gods. The first novel detailed the capture of humans from a planet called Anjiin. The humans are tasked with making themselves useful to their captors, the Carryx. If the humans cannot prove themselves useful, the Carryx will likely end human existence — at least, the existence of humans from Anjiin. 

The most useful humans tend to be scientists who can help the Carryx solve problems, such as creating food that will provide nutrition to other captive species. The humans also need to figure out how to reproduce more efficiently than the standard method, because a “moiety that cannot sustain its own population is not useful and will be culled.” Whether the humans should be complicit in “birthing new slaves for the Carryx” is one of several moral dilemmas the characters debate as they struggle for survival and the hope of freedom.

The Carryx follow the leadership of their Sovran, but they cannot be defeated by chopping off their organizational head because a Sovran, unlike a queen bee, is easily replaced by another Sovran. In fact, Sovrans only last a few years before one of their daughters challenges them to a battle for supremacy. One such challenge erupts during The Faith of Beasts, contributing both to human knowledge of the Carryx and despair that they seem so invulnerable.

When The Mercy of Gods ended, a few characters were plotting to fight back against the Carryx, because humans are badass and that’s what they do. Dafyd Alkhor and Jellit Kaul exposed a foolish group of rebellious conspirators to protect the larger group of humans and their (presumably more intelligent) clandestine efforts to continue the fight. Whether sacrificing a few for the good of the many was the right thing to do is one of the complex moral questions that the first two novels tackle.

Sometimes groups of humans are sent to other worlds on various missions in service of the Carryx. Jessyn Kaul and Garral Pär, while on one such mission, encounter beings who appear to be humans, although their origins are a mystery. Jessyn and Garral hope to use their knowledge of the other humans as a means of attacking the Carryx.

The first novel introduced aliens known as the swarm. They incorporate individuals into their collective, taking whatever shape they please. The swarm devours/incorporates some human characters who were introduced in the first novel,. We learn that the “swarm is a weapon of war. A spy sent to collect everything and transmit what it learns back to worlds it has never known.”

So the swarm count as good guys, even though they effectively murder individuals to gain access to their knowledge and talents. This sets up an interesting love-hate relationship between Daffyd and the swarm because the swarm killed/absorbed his lover. Should Daffyd have sex with the swarm if it takes the shape of his former lover? Ick. Overlaying the complexities of human emotions onto interactions with aliens has been a strength of the writers who use the collective pen name James S.A. Corey.

In addition to the humans led by Daffyd who plot against the Carryx, the side plot against the Carryx instigated by Jessyn and Garral, and the spying in which the swarm engage, the most formidable threat to the Carryx may be the beings known to the Carryx as the deathless enemy. They are an “enemy that hated the Carryx and fought against them on thousands of worlds.” Corey offers some hints as to the nature of the deathless enemy, but there is still much to be revealed. The Carryx want the humans to help them understand and defeat the deathless enemy, while the humans want to join forces with them to defeat the Carryx.

The Faith of Beasts moves the larger story forward, but there is a lot to unpack. Fortunately, occasional battles, clandestine acts of daring, and conflicts among human characters keep the story in motion. Still, holding all this information in the reader’s head may be challenging, particularly if the interval between each novel continues to be two years. The novels are lengthy and a reader may need to take notes to keep track of characters and events. Corey does a bit of internal summarizing so it isn't necessary to reread the first novel before tackling the second (although I might have been less confused had I done so).

The Faith of Beasts feels like it is continuing to lay a foundation for the larger story. The series was announced as a trilogy (with some novellas or short stories as filler), but the final book will need to be mammoth to bring everything together. I nevertheless look forward to reading it, because the Corey writing team produces some of the most inventive and enjoyable space opera in modern science fiction.

RECOMMENDED

Icarus 17 by Charles Cumming

Published by The Mysterious Press on July 7, 2026

In the fourth novel of Charles Cummings’ BOX 88 series, Lachlan Kite’s past catches up with him. Just before Martha Raine’s wedding in 2001, he had a last fling with her. The sex must have been good because Kite proposed to her the next morning, asking her to call off her wedding. But Martha knew that Kite was married to his job and would never give her the full and undivided attention she craved, so Kite and Martha went their separate ways.

Martha had a son and daughter before getting divorced in 2022. Meanwhile, Kite married a woman who was more tolerant of his need to divide his attention between his job and his family. Sadly for him, Kite’s wife is getting a bit weary of his insistence that saving the world from tyrants and terrorists is a worthier use of his time than hanging out with her. Such is life.

The story begins in 2018, when Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi is dismembered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. His killers later torture and murder Marc Chevalier because they believed he would expose kickbacks in the construction of NEOM, the city-of-the-future brainchild of Saudi Prince Mohammad bin Salman.

Back in the present, Kite is meeting Martha for dinner in London at her request when he learns that a shooter has killed people near his home in Sweden. Kite rushes back home, where he offers to retire so he can stay home and keep his family safe. His wife knows that retirement is not in the cards.

Martha reappears in Kite’s life when her son Max disappears. Kite uses his position at BOX 88 (a hybrid, off-the-books intelligence agency that combines resources of the US and UK) to search for Max. He discovers that Max has disappeared with his girlfriend, Yasmine, who seems to be using a fake identity. The reader, like Kite and Max, will wonder who she might really be. The answer is surprising.

Much of the novel follows Max and Yasmine as they flee from two competing teams of people who want to capture or kill Yasmine. In true thriller fashion, the young lovers stay a step ahead of the pursuit. In due course, Max and the reader learn why Yasmine is on the run. Hint: it has something to do with the death of Chevalier.

The rest of the novel follows Kite and Martha, who are a step behind Max and Yasmine. Their journey begins in Greece and moves to Albania before a final confrontation occurs in Sarajevo. Charles Cumming adds enough local color in each location to give the story a strong sense of atmosphere.

Yasmine’s predicament is unlikely but not nearly as implausible as the plots of most modern thrillers. The technology and tradecraft Kite uses to track down Yasmine and Max is fun. Kite’s characterization gains some depth, thanks to the tension caused by his competing relationships with his wife and Martha. The story moves with the pace of a thriller, placing Max and Yasmine in danger and giving Kite ample cause for worry about their fate.

The story gives a nod to current events, including an astute analysis (from a British perspective) of the American Right and its reaction to Obama (“Because of Obama you get Breitbart and the odious Bannon, as well as the attendant horrors of Fox News, Hannity, Tucker Carlson and so on. From there it is a very short journey indeed to Donald J. Trump.”). Apart from occasional commentary, the story is not overtly political, so open-minded espionage fans on both sides of the divide should be able to enjoy it. The story is complete and can be read as a standalone, but a teaser at the end will give series fans a reason to await the next installment.

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