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 his gripping and thought-provoking new thriller, Maxine Unleashes Doomsday, Nick Kolakowski imagines a post-apocalyptic, post-United States that feels disturbingly plausible, given the way things are going with our climate, our political divisions, and our growing dependence on technology.

Rising seas have turned New York City–the setting of some key scenes–into a nightmare version of Venice. America is no longer just divided; it’s completely fractured, having descended into a conglomeration of rival clans and territories, the highways connecting them under siege by bandits and patriot-movement-like gangs. And in perhaps the darkest development, artificial intelligence has begun to surpass human intelligence, assuming power-grabbing forms that make Alexa, Siri, and robotic vacuum cleaners look downright quaint by comparison.

In her reflective and lyrical début novel, As a River, Sion Dayson explores the hazards of secrets. Whether kept or revealed, they can exact a profound toll: on those who carry them and on those who either remain in the dark or are made to confront new–and potentially life-changing–truths. With deep feeling, Dayson traces these consequences across lives and generations, portraying how those affected cope–sometimes by strengthening old bonds or forming new ones.

In a clothing shop at a local mall, Jesse Albright turns away from her ten-year-old daughter, Sophie, for a moment. When she turns back, she finds that Sophie has vanished, as if into thin air.

Six years later, as Marlene Adelstein’s gripping and affecting début novel begins, Sophie is still nowhere to be found, and authorities have all but given up on the search for her. But Jesse hasn’t. Although almost everything about Jesse’s life has changed–she’s withdrawn from friends and neighbors, split with Sophie’s father, Cooper, and taken to drinking heavily–she continues to hold out hope that Sophie might be alive, somewhere. And in what Cooper and others see as hoarding caused by grief, Jesse fills the home she once shared with him and Sophie with found objects, seeing them as clues that Sophie has sent her to decipher.

From the start of this fast-paced thrill ride of a novel, the main character, Jake Halligan, is in danger. A bounty hunter, Jake has made lots of enemies among those who break the law, and even among some who enforce it. So when a body of a young woman turns up in his gun safe, it’s possible that one or more of these foes are trying to frame him, or send him a threatening message.

But as Jake soon discovers, bigger, more powerful forces are arrayed against him, for reasons that reach far back before his bounty-hunting days. And he learns that he is to become not the hunter but the hunted, in a decks-stacked-against-him challenge echoing the one at the heart of the classic short story (and movie) “The Most Dangerous Game.”

This entertaining and deeply affecting novel-in-stories, set in 1919, immerses us in the lives and travails of various members of Doc Bell’s Miracles and Mirth Medicine Show, a traveling ensemble of musicians, acrobats, and other performers who, depending on chemistry or circumstance, find love or discord, common cause or conflict, with their fellow show members. Allen takes us into the heart of these relationships, and into the interior lives of individual characters, creating an illuminating and satisfying experience for readers.