Lisa Gardner on…

Karin Slaughter:  Her detective Will Trent is one of the best series characters in suspense today.  Here’s a complex character whose greatness weakness—his severe dyslexia—is also his greatest strength, as it has made him a master observer of human behaviour.  And his love/hate relationship with his wife Angie…powerful, powerful stuff.

Tess Gerritsen:  While I’m a huge fan of her characters Rizzoli and Isles, my favourite novel remains The Bone Garden, a historic thriller that captures gruesome medical practices in the 1830s, when surgeons unwittingly cross-contaminated their patients and the demand for black market medical cadavers kept grave robbers in business.  The Bone Garden is a thriller that both entertains and informs, my favourite kind of book.

Lee Child:  His series character, Jack Reacher, remains the ultimate modern-day lone gunman, a former military cop who can find any problem in any small town and solve it (with maximum fire power) in twenty four hours or less.  Lee has breathed authenticity into his character, enabling you to admire Reacher’s military prowess even as you worry about his self-imposed isolation.   The result is an action hero with a heart.

Harlan Coben:  His breakout thriller Tell No One remains one of my favourite novels, and I consider Harlan the master of the so-called “domestic thriller”—books about ordinary people caught up in extraordinary circumstances.  Harlan’s characters feel like our best friends and next door neighbours: You recognize them instantly.  Then, the unthinkable happens, and now this husband/mother/child, must dig deep to save his family.  I find the novels very emotionally satisfying, the perfect way to unwind at the end of a long day. 

Jamie Freveletti:  Jamie won Best First Novel in 2010 from the International Thriller Writers for Running from the Devil.  Devil begins with a plane crash that lands an ultra-marathoner (a woman who races 100+ miles) in the middle of dense Columbian jungle, where she must outwit dozens of crazed drug lords to save her fellow passengers.  I thoroughly enjoyed Freveletti’s female action-hero, whose background makes her both compelling and credible.

Suzanne Collins:  I read the first novel of her trilogy, The Hunger Games, over the summer, and was mesmerized.  I'm not huge into futuristics, but this book worked for me because the world she created felt so real, and her characters even more genuine.  Her sixteen-year old protagonist, Katniss, is everything a heroine should be--tough, vulnerable, determined, desperate, gifted and flawed.  Plus, the whole set up of kids being forced to fight to the death for the amusement of a bored nation--to look at TV offerings these days, we're halfway there.

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