American Bones, RMT467E

Something is always buried. Not always a body, though bodies there are, and not always in the past, though the past is always implicated. There are cases filed years ago but never properly closed; marriages whose surfaces hold private lives that no one has yet thought to examine. Each of these novels knows exactly how to disturb that surface and begin to dig deep.

Harlan Coben, The Woods – A prosecutor's buried past resurfaces when a body is found near the camp where his sister vanished two decades ago.

Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl – On their fifth anniversary, Amy Dunne vanishes and her husband's increasingly suspect account begins to unravel.

Mary Higgins Clark, You Don't Own Me – Investigator Laurie Moran reopens the stabbing of a doctor whose wife insists on her innocence and whose secrets run deep.

Kathy Reichs, Bones Are Forever – Forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan traces infant remains from Montreal to the frozen Canadian north and a darker truth.