The Memory Collectors (Dete Meserve) – If you dig a good time travel yarn, one that’s less about sci-fi mechanics and more about the characters involved, then this one’s for you. In a nutshell, a company’s discovered how to send people back in time, into themselves and into their own past, for one hour. Four supposed strangers—each one of them having a strong emotional need for some kind of reconciliation— embark on their respective journeys, only to have their single hour inexplicably extend to multiple days. Of course, given it’s a time travel story, the past and present and future are all twisted up together in intriguing ways. I highly recommend this.

Fearless and Nobody’s Hero (W. M. Craven) – Fearless and Nobody’s Hero are the first two installments in what I assume/hope will be the long-running Ben Koenig thriller series. Koenig is an ex-US Marshall with a tremendous set of skills. Sound familiar? If you’re a Jack Reacher fan, as I am, then it should, as Koenig is very clearly modelled after Lee Child’s iconic big man (Craven even name-checks Reacher a couple times, to, I assume, ensure that we know that he knows that we know what he’s doing). The main difference between the two characters is that while Child doesn’t feel the need to explain why Reacher is so relentlessly forward-moving in his approach to, well, everything—he just is, seemingly so from birth—Craven supplies a biological reason for his hero’s unflinchingly brutal capability, in that Koenig has a medical condition that prevents him from feeling any fear. With Lee Child no longer writing Jack Reacher novels, Craven has clearly decided to pick up the mantle, and I’m all for it.

Heartwood (Amity Gaige) – A woman goes missing while hiking the Appalachian Trail. That’s all I needed to know, as it combines two of my fascinations: people doing super long hikes/walks and wilderness survival. The novel was also (correctly) compared to one of my all-time favourites, The God of the Woods. Told from multiple points of view—the main ones being that of the woman who’s gone missing, the Game Warden who’s heading up the search, and an isolated woman in a seniors’ home who takes a particular interest in the story—Heartwood is a page-turner that’s both thoughtful and terrifically thrilling.

King of Ashes (S. A. Cosby) – While this crime thriller about a successful money manager who finds himself wrapped up in a harrowing, increasingly violent scheme to extricate his family from a gang of psychotic gangsters is, as all of Cosby’s novels are, superbly engaging, it might actually be a little too engaging, as I found it difficult to leave behind its disturbing, perfectly rendered world even when I wasn’t actively reading it. I guess that’s a good thing—it’s certainly a testament to Cosby’s literary powers—even if it meant I had to endure one figurative gut-punch after another.

The Hike (Drew Magary) – This is an interesting one. It’s about a guy who takes what he intends to be a short, peaceful walk while he’s staying at a hotel in the country. As it turns out, forces beyond his control have other ideas, and he ends up being sucked into a quest that involves a seemingly never-ending series of arbitrary foes and impediments. I say this is interesting, because while I wasn’t totally engaged by the episodic randomness of the plot (one reviewer compared it to a Sierra King’s Quest game, and I’d say that’s bang on, in that those games, particularly King’s Quest 3, contained ridiculously random puzzles and often even even more ridiculously random solutions to said puzzles), it all leads to an exceptionally satisfying, and, for me, totally surprising ending that, much like the trials and tribulations forced upon the unwitting protagonist, makes the whole campaign/enterprise ultimately worthwhile.