Beautiful Ugly

By Alice Feeney

Obsession, romantic and otherwise, is the dominant theme of this month’s thrillers, whose characters often live on the edge of madness. Let’s start with Feeney’s BEAUTIFUL UGLY (Flatiron, 295 pp., $28.99). Feeney is known for pulling jaw-dropping surprises on her readers, and in her latest novel lulls us into believing that we’re reading a straightforward missing-person mystery. Abby Goldman, an investigative journalist in England, is driving home and talking to her husband, a novelist named Grady Green, when she stops to help a woman lying in the road. She never returns, and though her car turns up, she’s not in it.

A year later, distraught and running out of money as he struggles to write his next book, Grady is offered what appears to be the perfect antidote to his troubles: the chance to live rent-free in a writer’s cottage on Amberly (pop. 25), a tiny island in the Scottish Highlands. “Rest, walk, read, sleep … and who knows, maybe you might even be able to write,” his agent says.

The cottage is cozy and the island idyllic (and without cell service or the internet), but many things are off. The map that greets visitors is marked by a red triangle saying YOU ARE NOT HERE. Under the floorboards of his new home, Grady finds what appears to be bones from a human hand. The islanders are perversely vague about the return ferry schedule. And why does Grady keep thinking he sees his wife?

The book branches into unexpected directions on multiple fronts that are too weird to describe here; it’s better to relax and just go with it.

Alert readers will notice that the chapter titles are all oxymorons: “Passive-Aggressive,” “Silent Scream,” “Innocent Criminal” and — this is an important clue to the unreliability of the narration — “Happily Married.”

The Forger’s Requiem

By Bradford Morrow

THE FORGER’S REQUIEM (Atlantic Monthly Press, 288 pp., $27) opens with a cracker of a scene: An unconscious man wakes up to the horrifying discovery that he has been buried alive. “He was drowning, but in the land, not the sea,” Morrow writes. He escapes, stumbling into a nearby house whose occupants are away. Its elegant printing press and library filled with rare books spur him to remember who he is: Henry Slader, a high-end literary forger and part of a shadowy subculture rife with professional jealousy, personal rivalry and murderous impulses. (The house is owned by his avowed enemy, the possibly insane Will Gardener.)

Morrow alternates between Slader’s story and the parallel adventures of Nicole, Will’s precocious 20-something daughter. She’s an adept forger herself. In a book full of blackmail, murder and other misdeeds, forgery turns out to be the most exciting kind of crime, as Nicole embarks on an audacious plot to manufacture a cache of fake letters from Mary Shelley, the author of “Frankenstein,” to her deceased mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, the author of “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.”

“Here was the heart of forgery that I admit to finding compelling, even addictive — the imperative of getting into the mind and the spirit and soul and even body of another person,” Nicole thinks. “Here was how forgery could be a way of telling fresh truths.”

This is the last volume of a trilogy that began with “The Forgers,” which laid out the back stories that animate all the characters. But though it can sometimes be unnecessarily complicated, it works just fine on its own.

Cross My Heart

By Megan Collins

Rosie Lachlan, the possibly unhinged main character of Collins’s CROSS MY HEART (Atria, 309 pp., $28.99), has two vexing problems: She’s in precarious health following a heart transplant, and she’s an emotional wreck after being dumped by yet another boyfriend she hoped to marry.

She’s a serious romantic obsessive. When she falls for Morgan Thorne, the widower of the deceased woman whose heart now beats in her chest and with whom she’s been communicating via a website that matches organ recipients with donor families, it feels like the stuff of romantic comedy. It doesn’t hurt that Morgan is a hot celebrity thriller writer whose social media posts are full of juicy details that pique her fanatical imagination.

“I listen to the same music Morgan uses in his Instagram stories, rewatch the same movies he references in captions,” she thinks. Uh-oh.

You can bet that Rosie spends her free time gathering every available scrap of information about Morgan, his dead wife, their friends and their friends’ friends. But there’s a possible hitch in her fantasy of him as her perfect future husband. “His wife’s death wasn’t an accident,” someone has written in the comments to one of his Instagram posts.

This is a curious book: part (possible) murder mystery, part deep dive into out-of-control social media addiction and part sleight-of-hand trick by the author. There’s a terrific, and violent, plot twist in the middle. Is it a romantic comedy freighted with darkness or a dark novel leavened by observational humor? You be the judge.