by G. Robert Frazier

Looking for a good read this summer? Here are a few excellent books for your consideration:

Stephen Florida by Gabe Habash

Stephen Florida by Gabe Habash is a frenetic, frantic, frustrating and, above all, fun read. Habash is the product of an MFA program at New York University and the fiction reviews editor for Publishers Weekly. His complex fictional creation, college wrestler and titular hero Stephen Florida, isn’t so easy to grasp, and that’s what makes him so fascinating.

Read the full review here.

Testimony by Scott Turow

Scott Turow takes a bold step with his latest novel, Testimony, by moving the typical legal suspense his fans have become accustomed to out of the courtroom, as well as out of the country altogether.  His first case before the International Criminal Court in The Hague involves the disappearance of some 400 refugees during the Bosnian war, who are presumed to have been buried alive.  Turow not only reinvents his protagonist by taking him out of his element, but reasserts himself as a master of the mystery genre.

Read the full review here.

Proving Ground by Peter Blauner

Former Army lieutenant Nathaniel “Natty Dread” Dresden, already haunted by the death of a young Iraqi boy at his hands, is further traumatized when his father, civil rights lawyer David Dresden, is killed in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. If you are a fan of NBC’s “Law & Order” programs, you’ll probably be a fan of Peter Blauner’s new novel, Proving Ground.

Read the full review here.

Into the Water by Paula Hawkins

Paula Hawkins follows her debut smash, The Girl on the Train, with the twisty and compulsive Into the Water. Told through multiple viewpoints, the story immerses the reader in a complex web of suspense, suspicion and emotional turmoil as her characters wrestle with the recent drowning of a single mother and a teenage girl, their bodies found weeks apart at the bottom of a river known as the Drowning Pool.

Read the full review here.

Say Nothing by Brad Parks

From the opening chapter, Brad Parks drops the hammer down on his main character, Federal Judge Scott Sampson, and doesn’t let up until the suspense-filled finish in his new novel, Say Nothing. Part domestic thriller, part legal thriller, Scott’s story begins when his world when  his 6-year-old twins, Sam and Emma, are kidnapped; if he wants to see them alive again he’ll do exactly as told and “say nothing.”

Read the full review here.

The Whole Art of Detection by Lyndsay Faye

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes canon found a home and a ravenous readership in the pages of The Strand Magazine in the late 1800s. Now, more than a century later, author Lindsay Faye has continued that tradition with her own Holmes adventures in the modern-day incarnation of The Strand. Fortunately for Holmes aficionados, if you haven’t been able to keep up with the publication, 15 of her tales (including two new stories) are now available in a new, collected volume, The Whole Art of Detection: Lost Mysteries of Sherlock Holmes.

Read the full review here.

Order to Kill by Kyle Mills

Vince Flynn’s CIA agent Mitch Rapp is in good hands with author Kyle Mills, who takes Rapp to the limit in his latest novel, Order to Kill. This time around, Rapp is called upon to ferret out the location of nuclear fuel stolen from a half dozen Pakistani warheads and prevent the fissile material from being detonated in a series of dirty bombs.

Read the full review here.