South of Nowhere

By Jeffery Deaver

Colter Shaw is a professional “rewards seeker,” a skilled tracker who specializes in finding missing people — usually for the reward money, though sometimes out of the goodness of his heart. It’s a simple enough vocation and yet, as the suspense veteran Deaver has demonstrated in four prior Shaw novels (and the TV adaptation “Tracker”), the ways in which Shaw finds peril — or peril finds him — keep multiplying. In SOUTH OF NOWHERE (Putnam, 403 pp., $30), his sister Dorion implores him to help to locate potential survivors after a levee collapses in a small Northern California town.

From here, Deaver is off to the proverbial races. Does every chapter have a twist? Pretty much. Is Colter just likable enough to brush off needless conflict and still find time for romance? Definitely. Is the writing a little too reminiscent of detailed outlines like the ones Deaver is known to fashion before writing a first draft? You bet. Could I put the book down? Not a chance.

The Colter Shaw series prioritizes action and the constant possibility of calamity, leaving only the barest amount of room for character development, like Colter’s continued grappling with the effects of his survivalist upbringing. The books don’t measure up to the best of Deaver’s Lincoln Rhyme novels, but they all accomplish their mission: thrilling engagement.

Detective Aunty

by Uzma Jalaluddin

Kausar Khan, introduced in DETECTIVE AUNTY (Harper Perennial, 326 pp., paperback, $17.99), has spent the past 20 years relishing the stability of placid North Bay, where she and her husband moved after fleeing busy, bustling Toronto in the wake of a family tragedy.

But then her husband dies shortly after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and her daughter, Sana, calls with upsetting news: “I’m in trouble. There’s been a murder, and I’m the prime suspect.” It seems Sana’s landlord has been found inside her clothing store with a dagger in his chest. Kausar returns to Toronto’s Golden Crescent neighborhood as both a concerned mother and a tenacious amateur sleuth.