5 mysteries and thrillers new this fall

Meghan Collins Sullivan/NPR

It’s almost Halloween — and, anyway, fall is always a great time for mysteries and thrillers.

This batch is intriguing, for sure. It includes an homage to Shirley Jackson, an examination of online lists crashing into real life, and an atmospheric look at the world of queer people in the 1950s Navy.

A Haunting on the Hill

While Elizabeth Hand’s new novel might not be the same as a new novel from Shirley Jackson, it’s pretty close, because Hand (Curious Toys) wittily and delicately ties her titular locale to Jackson’s famed Hill House and its creepy doings. A Haunting on the Hill follows a quartet of theater people who decide to hold rehearsals at a wonderfully decrepit and disturbing old mansion. Each of the four has some kind of secret and each of the four will be triggered by things that happen during their stay; readers should understand, from Hand’s previous books, that she’s more interested in atmosphere and suspense than in gotchas and procedure. Her plots take place in old-time Chicago, contemporary Hawai’i, an English country house, and always play hard with juxtapositions (like placing a rock band in that country house) and interior fears and desires. Despite the misgivings of playwright Holly and her girlfriend Nisa, what happens on the Hill could be benign. It could be. But they should know that anything can happen before the curtain goes down on the play…

The Leftover Woman

Anyone looking for an of-the-moment page-turner of a novel need look no further. Jean Kwok — whose Girl in Translation and Searching for Sylvie Lee are novels that illuminate the Chinese experience in America — expands her material in a thriller about a Chinese woman named Jasmine Yang who…