THE CHILL by Scott Carson (Emily Bestler/Atria). A compulsively readable, big horror novel—a historical novel with very creepy, clearly supernatural elements, at least—by a favorite of this column, but under a pseudonym. He's known, and reviewed, including here with admiration, for slightly spooky crime novels that are always on or around bestseller lists—and deserve to be; he's really good. He's really good in this one, too, and I almost recognized him, but I didn't: it's Michael Koryta. There are certainly misdeeds at the heart of this story, too, but solving crimes is not part of the suspense, here. A town is drowned, 'way upstate, by a dam constructed to create a reservoir for New York City, and, of course, remains there, the town, in those depths. And not everybody got out OK. And, in fact, not everybody was all that OK even before the reservoir drowned their town. Hate, it may be, never drowns. And it isn't only the spooky part that's horrifying; writing about things in deep, cold water, this guy can make you feel, well . . . cold. And in deep.

THE KING'S JUSTICE: A Maggie Hope Mystery by Susan Elia MacNeal (Bantam). The great Maggie Hope is back in London after having been isolated with fellow operatives (THE PRISONER IN THE CASTLE, remember), and, like London at this point in the Second World War, she's a little the worse for wear. Drinking, and developing some rough edges, when first met, here. So some inner struggles need winning as well as a confrontation with evil in the world. Really, this solid gold series even gains a few karats, now.

THE GENIUS OF WOMEN by Janice Kaplan (Dutton). What seems at first a cheerful sort of smart women's chat about women and their rights and standing in the world turns out to pack a subtle but genuinely mind-reshaping punch. A lot of profiles of remarkable women, many of them known to us, many not so much, and some breathtakingly candid conversations.

THE BORDER by Don Winslow (Morrow). This is an oversized, trade paperback, a point worth reporting because it's a typical Winslow, over 700 of what are surely the very same pages that told this tale in last year's hard-cover bestseller. It's the climactic third of his great drug war trilogy, which, if it weren't so fast-moving and so emotionally powerful would almost amount to a history of the el Chapo era in our real world (though the character based on that kingpin was killed in book two, instead of being captured and kept behind bars ever since). But it isn't all history, anyway; some of it is current events. It isn't so much cocaine, now, for one thing, but opioids and other stuff. The whole enormous trilogy (after THE POWER OF THE DOG, of 2005, and THE CARTEL, 2015) will become a TV series in the next year or so (work has already begun).