The following books are on book retailers' shelves (and libraries' shelves, too), and have been for just a few days (since before America turned into a continent-sized petrie dish for pandemic). They are all gathering dust, there, one supposes—though Amazon is busy vacuuming up orders, I believe. The column continues to receive books (and a lot of electronic files readable on the very screen I'm staring at even now—like many of you, I imagine, I'm not getting far from this desk, much, for the foreseeable. . .). So the column can continue. Stay safe, readers!

A CONSPIRACY OF BONES: A Temperance Brennan Novel by Kathy Reichs (Scribner). Really, no reader of this column, or of suspense fiction in general, needs to hear from me about a new Temperance Brennan mystery. This (#19 of that series) is Reichs's first within the series in 4 or 5 years, after a stand-alone thriller and her novella in collaboration with Lee Child, where Tempe meets Jack Reacher. But I'd like to get on record, anyway: this is at least as good as the very best of the series; Tempe's aging, some, at last, but her work doesn't care, and neither does her hostile new boss, and the book continues the subtle shift over the series to include more thriller-style danger to Tempe herself. In this one, things get really hairy. And yet no less mystery and detection, criminal and medical, and certainly no less blood. And guts. And, sure, bones.

MARGUERITE by Marina Kemp (Viking). Another suspense novel, of a sort—it's slightly but persistently creepy, establishing and then calmly presenting ongoing reasons to be uneasy, all in the close POV of a likable but unsettled and unsettling young woman. It's more sensitively observed and beautifully written than we're used to within the genre, though, even from elite writers; atmosphere convincingly (and comfortably) French, though the author is British; beautifully sustained pace, maintaining suspense and surprises without stunts or showy effort. This is a writer to watch, then; you'll remember this first novel for the gently turned tourniquet of suspense, more sad than sadistic, yet unrelenting. Her next may not be a suspense novel, at all. Or it may be another as irresistible as this one.

THE DEEP by Alma Katsu (Putnam). An established star in supernatural horror fiction, and a big novel not so delicately beautiful as Kemp's Marguerite, but delighting the mind in the way an intricately made watch does (though no winding down occurs—tension continually mounts). Two time lines are kept in delicate balance: one, the great ocean liner Titanic's last voyage, the other, that of Titanic's sister ship the Brittanic, 6 years later, serving as a hospital ship in the Royal Navy in the Great War, with a few of the same haunted (literally) people aboard.