When I finished Nick Kolakowski’s riveting thriller Boise Longpig Hunting Club, I was eager for a sequel. Over the course of that novel, the central characters–bounty hunter Jake Halligan, his gun-running sister, Frankie, and Jake’s fiancée, Janine–became prey in a “Most Dangerous Game”-style hunt orchestrated by a corrupt and powerful billionaire, Ted Baker, who’d blamed the death of his coke-dealing brother on Jake and Frankie’s late father, a former deputy. Though the trio ended up slaughtering their way to freedom, one thing seemed clear by the novel’s conclusion: When you kill a man like Baker, along with his rich and influential fellow hunters, there are bound to be consequences.

Fortunately for readers like me, Kolakowski just released Rattlesnake Rodeo, a gripping sequel that unleashes these consequences with force, pushing Jake and Frankie into uncomfortable new territory, physically and morally.

In the simplest sense, Rage is a Wolf portrays one young woman’s quest to make a difference in the world and to find meaning in her life, outside of the boundaries of high school. But much to this credit of this imaginative and inspiring novel, her quest is nothing but simple, and it leads to transformative discoveries about herself and the world.

In this inventive and affecting novel, the barriers between the real world and the worlds of the imagination, magic, and folklore become porous at best and sometimes dissolve altogether. As disorienting as these breaks with reality are for the couple at the center of the story, Adrian Dussett and Ben Hughes, they ultimately prove revelatory, pushing Adrian and Ben to confront personal difficulties that have troubled them for years and created a divide in their relationship.

K: A Novel offers a gripping, nuanced exploration of how imprisonment tests a writer–mentally, physically, and morally. Just as compelling is how the novel conveys the writer’s need for self-expression, which never diminishes, even under the most trying circumstances.

With page-turner plots that take us to dark places, on both sides of the law, Chris McGinley’s rural-noir story collection, Coal Black, is a deeply satisfying read. What makes the book even more captivating is how deeply rooted each story is in the book’s setting: the hills of eastern Kentucky, a place of both natural beauty and human struggle, and to certain of McGinley’s characters, a place where figures from local folklore and legends can sometimes feel just as real–and just as threatening–as a gun-toting thief or drug dealer.

In novels or dramas about fraught romantic relationships, the narrative often feels bent toward disintegration, with the possibility–and sometimes the inevitability–of separation looming over every scene. What distinguishes Cynthia Newberry Martin’s début novel, Tidal Flats, is how it deeply it immerses us in one character’s process of figuring out what might be lost or gained by staying in a seriously challenged relationship, or by moving on from it. The outcome of her process never feels certain nor inevitable, and the result is a captivating and illuminating read.