Robert Sawyer's Red Planet Blues: Neither Fish nor Fowl

 Robert J. Sawyer - Red Planet Blues

It’s hard to track a person if you don’t know what body he’s in. He could look like anyone –his own self, a movie star, your best friend… Alex Lomax, greatest private eye in all of New Klondike, Mars (in large part because he’s the only private eye in all of New Klondike, Mars) pretty much has a system, however. He kills ‘em all and lets God sort ‘em out. 

No, to be fair, he doesn’t kill them all: if they’re female, he beds them and then kills them (or tries, anyway). In the finest noir detective tradition, Lomax chases every skirt that comes his way and whips out his other rod for the men. Mike Hammer on Mars? Maybe… 

Owen Laukkanen, Criminal Enterprise: The Sophomore Slump Strikes Again

Criminal Enterprise - Owen Laukkanen

Like many a man, Carter Tomlin defined himself by his profession - a profession in which he was successful; so successful that he and his gorgeous wife and two daughters could live in a St. Paul mansion and he could tool around in an $80K Jaguar. When the middle-aged accountant was handed a pink slip, however, life took a turn for the worse. As weeks turned into months and the bills mounted, Tomlin started getting desperate. 

The reason bank robbers get caught, some claim, is that they're stupid: they make mistakes, they brag to the wrong people, they flash the cash in the wrong place. Carter Tomlin, however, was smart. He robbed again. And again. And after a year or so, he'd assembled a crew of three and perfected his method - a method that, naturally, brought him to the attention of the local office of the FBI.

Enter Carla Windermere... the day Windermere showed up on his doorstep was the day the wheels started to come off Carter Tomlin's little Criminal Enterprise. It would only get worse... 

That's when he robbed his first bank. 

Snow White Must Die? Kill the Bitch Already!

Tobias Sartorius spent a decade in solitary confinement in a German prison, convicted at seventeen for  murdering two seventeen-year-old classmates in his home town, the  village of Altenhain near Frankfurt. Unlike most convicted murderers, Tobi never claimed innocence: he didn't know if he was the killer, since he'd been in a drunken stupor. He was awakened by the police investigating the simultaneous disappearances of Laura and Stefanie - the first his ex-girlfriend, the second his current sweetie. Without bodies, the case was entirely circumstantial, but there was plenty of  evidence and enough witnesses to send the manchild away for a decade.

Life Among Giants: Bill Roorbach's Giant of a Novel

You probably wouldn't expect the Hochmeyer kids to be anything unusual. They seemed just two more garden-variety suburban baby-boomer bedroom-community kids from Connecticut, fated to grow up to work in the financial district or as a nurse. But then life dealt them a different hand.

Meet David "Lizard" Hochmeyer, former third-string quarterback for the Miami Dolphins, now a wildly successful restaurateur; and his sister Kate, at one time eighteenth-ranked women's tennis player in the world, now a bipolar mess. From the day English rocker Dabney Stryker-Stewart and his ballerina wife, Sylphide, moved into the mansion across the lake from the Hochmeyers' home, the siblings' lives changed forever; changed from ordinary lives to Life Among Giants. 

Gillian Flynn dissects an imperfect marriage: Gone Girl

Gone Girl - Gillian Flynn

The scenario hits the tabloids every couple of years. You know the one: you’ve seen it, if only because the images seem somehow unavoidable with those faces plastered everywhere. Sure, you remember: a photogenic young blonde wife (preferably pregnant) gone missing… a hapless husband, eyes bruised-looking from exhaustion, reading a statement begging for her return under the hot glare of the klieg lights… professionally-outraged talking heads on cable TV dialing up the accusations and the high dudgeon… legions of bonbon-gobbling house -wives (and –husbands) instantly experts in their own minds on blood spatter, rip tides, and undetectable poisons. Sure, you know the scenario: there’s a Gone Girl out there.