It's a glorious time of the year if you're obsessed with fictional serial killers (as I am). Detective Alex Cross (played brilliantly by Aldis Hodge) chases a charming one in the new series "Cross" (streaming on Prime), and in two out of the three of my recent favorites, serial killers run the show.

The Reaping
The Reaping

"Head Cases," by John McMahon, is a twisting FBI procedural with a cool cast of characters who've all experienced a "career slide" that's landed them in the Pattern and Recognition (PAR) unit. In this series debut, they take on "a serial killer" who's "murdering serial killers." I was in heaven.

Not only because there's more than one serial killer, but I also loved that the PAR agents don't play well with others. Mostly, they're behind desks assigned to connect "disparate elements" to solve crimes under the guidance of Gardner Camden.

Camden is a complicated and richly imagined character, a neurodivergent thinker with a "lower than normal affect," who needs things to be "delightfully predictable." Camden's a particularly damaged man (let's just say his "singular pursuit of the truth" is not a mantra). When Camden learns a serial killer assumed dead is not, he and his team join the hunt, one that's riddled with enigmas. The grotesque quotient in "Head Cases" (which will be on shelves Jan. 28, 2025) is not "Se7en," but maybe a three.

Shell Games
Shell Games

In many ways, McMahon's Agent Camden shares similar qualities with Anthony Award-winning Minnesota author Jess Lourey's brilliant Agent Harry Steinbeck. Like Camden, Steinbeck is a neurodivergent thinker, a forensic scientist who prefers the lab to life outside, a man who needs to compartmentalize everything. But in Lourey's phantastic atmospheric thriller "The Reaping," the walls between his compartments are "tissue paper."

Harry and his partner Evangeline (aka Van) Reed are co-leading a case for the first time, one involving a "nursing home for serial killers" (I know, right?! Literary paradise). Van's "messy habits" make Harry "twitchy" at the best of times. This case is his worst of times.

Harry and Van head to Duluth to investigate the unsolved murders of a family in the 1990s, a crime mimicking a serial killer rooted in the noir Finnish fable of the "veri noita" (blood witch), who, according to the lore, makes disobedient children disappear. The problem for Harry is "every return to the Northland" forces him to face his past and the disappearance of his sister, a truth he's kept locked away in one of his compartments.

The novel's setting in fictional, Alku, Minn., an insular community founded by seven immigrant Finnish families, is truly creepy, and Lourey's skillful manipulation of flashbacks cranks the suspense.

Finally, if serial killers aren't your jam, then my third recommendation is Bonnie Kistler's "Shell Games," a clever Alfred Hitchcock/Patricia Highsmith ("Strangers on a Train") psychological mystery. It involves a wedding night confession about the Tylenol murders in the 1980s, multiple not-quite-perfect marriages (although their sex is hot), a manipulative matriarch (whom Nicole Kidman would play perfectly) and a charming elderly male (think Cary Grant or Hugh Grant) who may or may not have "bamboozled the shrewdest woman on the planet" — the matriarch. There's also a paranoid daughter with mommy (and daddy) issues, who may or may not be getting gaslit (is that a word?). You get my point. This novel is whip-fast, wryly narrated and a mind game of a read. Keep your eye on the ball.

Carole E. Barrowman, author of "Hollow Earth," reads and writes in Waconia.


Head Cases

By: John McMahon.

Publisher: Minotaur, 352 pages, $28.


The Reaping

By: Jess Lourey.

Publisher: Thomas & Mercer, 326 pages, $16.99.


Shell Games

By: Bonnie Kistler.

Publisher: Harper, 320 pages, $18.99.