You can't choose your family

New stories from seasoned writers deliver taut plot turns.

- CRAIG SISTERSON

THE MIDNIGHT KING by Tariq Ashkanani (Viper, $37.99)

Edinburgh solicitor and author Tariq Ashkanani announced himself as an exciting new talent while gathering good reviews and awards for his first two crime novels, layered smalltown thrillers set in the US.

With this new dark tale he takes a leap. In the crime-meets-horror The Midnight King, former detective Isaac Holloway is limping through life as a private eye doing low-level insurance and cheating-spouse cases while his old school pal Nathan Cole has reluctantly returned to Nashville following the suicide of his father, a renowned pulp fiction author. Isaac is one of the few who knows how troubled Nathan's relationship was with his dad, but even he doesn't know just how evil Lucas Cole was. As Isaac and Nathan separately search for a young girl who's gone missing, another man sits on death row and Nathan begins to read his father's unpublished final manuscript. Ashkanani crafts a tremendous tale, though given serial child abductions and very dark twists, it may prove too much for some.