Decisive Measures by John Nichol
          When helicopter pilot Jack Griffiths leaves the RAF to join a private military company, Decisive Measures, he hopes to put behind him forever the brutal ethnic conflicts he witnessed in Bosnia and Kosovo. And to bury the memory of a disastrous mission which ended in the loss of many innocent lives.
          His new job takes him to Sierra Leone to carry out routine security operations in the diamond fields. Once out there Jack meets Layla,a doctor working with a local charity, but their growing friendship is torn aprat when civil war erupts. And Jack is sent back into combat where he has to confront once more the consequences of his past mistake. Then Decisive Measures abandon the mine workers to their fate and Jack and Layla are forced to decide where their true loyalties lie. 

In a Dry Season by Peter Robinson
          Detective chief inspector Alan Banks is a walking midlife crisis, full of rage because of his recently failed marriage, a career crippled by a jealous superior, and problems with his son. In less skilled hands, Banks could have quickly become a royal pain, but Robinson makes him instead a very likable character, who is slightly baffled and bemused by his bad luck. When he criticizes his son Brian’s decision to drop out of college to become a rock musician, Banks quickly regrets it–recognizing the same impulses that made him rebel against his own parents, and some of the pain he felt when a college friend died of a drug overdose. The realization that Brian’s heavy-metal band is actually quite good brings genuine pleasure to a man whose idea of rock is Love’s Forever Changes and other 1970s delights.
          Banks is assigned to work on a case that the Yorkshire police department considers to be somewhat of a joke. The skeleton of a woman wrapped in World War II blackout curtains has been found in a dried-out reservoir. This man-made watering hole was a village–Hobbs End–that had been flooded many years earlier. Through the journal of a major player we realize early on who the dead woman is, but a large part of the fun is watching Banks and an edgy, attractive female cop put the pieces of the puzzle together. In a Dry Season is a stylish and gently reflective tale of secrets and lies.

24 Hours by Greg Iles
          24 Hours begins with the perfect family. On the perfect night. About to be trapped in the perfect crime. Will and Karen Jennings are a successful young couple with every reason to celebrate. From modest beginnings they have built the life of their dreams. Will has a thriving medical practice, and stands at the threshold of a great fortune. Karen has designed a magnificent house to shelter them and the five-year-old daughter they love beyond measure. But they are about to be tested in a way they could never imagine. 
          They have been targeted by John Hickey, a genius who has found the key to one of the oldest crimes in the world – Kidnapping. Hickey has turned the crime inside out, creating an unbreakable knot of technology and terror that no man can unravel. In twenty-four hours of hellish precision, he squeezes a family’s pressure points, extracts the ransom, and vanishes into thin air, leaving the hostage alive but the family too shattered even to call the police. Five times he has executed his plan, and not once has he been caught. He is unstoppable. Untouchable. 
          But this time Hickey wants more than money. This time he is driven by the pain of his own family tragedy, one he lays at the door of Will and Karen Jennings. He means to avenge it in his own terrible way and disappear forever. He has reckoned every factor but one: Will, Karen, and Abby Jennings share a love that only the closest families know, and from that love grows a formidable strength. 
          Though miles apart, the brilliant physician, the protective mother, and the resourceful child struggle against the clock to thwart the madman who threatens their family, and to reunite at last. 
          They have twenty-four hours to succeed where others have failed. Twenty-four hours to cut the unbreakable knot. Twenty-four hours to live or die.

Nora, Nora by Anne Rivers Siddons
          The young heroine of Nora, Nora comes from a long line of angst-ridden adolescents, stretching back through Holden Caulfield and Frankie Addams to Huckleberry Finn. Yet Peyton McKenzie certainly has good reason to be unhappy. Her household, in the small Georgia town of Lytton, is shadowed by the deaths of her mother and older brother. Her father, meanwhile, has withdrawn into mournful distraction: "When Buddy died in an accident in his air-force trainer, when Peyton was five, Frazier McKenzie closed up shop on his laughter, anger, small foolishnesses, and large passions. Now, at twelve, Peyton could remember no other father than the cooled and static one she had."
          To withstand this mortuary atmosphere–not to mention a touch of small-town claustrophobia–Peyton has founded the Losers Club, where she and two other misfits share their daily doses of unhappiness. But everything changes when her cousin Nora shows up for a visit. This jaunty outsider is unlike anybody else in Kennedy-era Lytton, circa 1961: 
          The first thing you noticed about Nora Findlay, Peyton thought, was that she gave off heat, a kind of sheen, like a wild animal, except that hers was not a dangerous ferality, but an aura of sleekness and high spirits. There was a padding, hip-shot prowl to her walk, and she moved her body as if she were totally unconscious of it, as if its suppleness and sinew were something she had lived with all her life.
          At first Nora’s high spirits have a tonic effect, jogging both Peyton and her father out of their torpor. But her involvement in racial politics eventually rubs some of Lytton’s citizens the wrong way–and puts her young cousin’s loyalty to the test. Anne Rivers Siddons handles the narrative with a deft touch for local color (right down to the perpetual "three Coca-Colas in an old red metal ice chest"). But her feeling for her cast of characters is even better, mixing just the right proportions of delicacy and Southern discomfort.