THE BIG PLOT twist in Clare Mackintosh's first novel, I LET YOU GO (Berkley, $26), is genuinely shocking. The jolts that follow, right up until the last page, are pretty good too. And if you're the kind of genre geek who jumps back to the beginning of a book to work out how you've been hoodwinked, you'll find that the author has played fair and square. This cunning psychological thriller opens at Christmastime in Bristol with the hit-and-run accident that kills a 5-year-old boy named Jacob - and with his mother's horror as she watches the driver of the car speed away. Detective Inspector Ray Stevens, the man in charge of the case, assembles a crack investigative team, but there are few leads to go on, and Jacob's traumatized single mother, who happens to be the only witness, withdraws into guilt and grief. ("It happened so quickly. . . . I only let go for a second.") The narrative continues in the anguished voice of Jenna Gray, recounting how she flees her home in the accident's aftermath and somehow makes her way to Wales, where she finds sanctuary by renting a stone cottage in the coastal village of Penfach. During the long, cold winter, her misery gradually lightens, and by summer Jenna is walking along the shore with the stray dog she has adopted (and the gentle veterinarian who's helping her care for him). She also finds an artistic project - drawing messages in the sand and taking photographs of them from the top of the cliffs - that tourists are eager to buy. Lest we forget, Inspector Stevens is still on the case back in Bristol. But by the time the police realize that Jacob's mother has no intention of returning home, they've lost much chance of locating her. "There was a bit of backlash on a local web forum," Stevens is told, "someone stirring up trouble, suggesting she was an unfit mother, that sort of thing." Web shaming is one of several aspects of socially condoned (or tolerated) sadism, including ostracism, domestic violence and the bullying of schoolchildren, that Mackintosh goes on to explore with great clarity. It's the reader's own mind that bends to the subtle misdirections and evasions of her storytelling. THE SINNER WHO gets a chance to start over is an archetypal figure in crime fiction. Steve Hamilton works a smart variation on it in THE SECOND LIFE OF NICK MASON (Putnam, $26), which presents the title character with the opportunity to shave 20 years off his 25-to-life prison sentence and make things right with his wife and daughter. To repay Darius Cole, the gang boss who arranged for his freedom, Mason must always carry the cellphone he's been given. "You're going to answer this phone," Mason's henchman tells him. "There is no busy. . . . There is only you answering this phone. Then doing exactly what I tell you to do." Regrettably, once Mason is back home in Chicago the first call on that phone directs him to kill a man - a crooked cop, as it happens, but still. . . . In that moment, Mason understands what Darius meant when he said, "For the next 20 years, your life belongs to me." Or does it? Darius is a cunning fellow who wants to run his criminal empire like his hero, Meyer Lansky. But Nick Mason is a desperate man, which gives him the edge in this battle. OSCAR DE MURIEL'S hugely entertaining Victorian mystery, THE STRINGS OF MURDER (Pegasus Crime, $26.95), finds Inspector Ian Frey in disgrace, sent by Scotland Yard to Edinburgh to join the Commission for the Elucidation of Unsolved Cases Presumably Related to the Odd and Ghostly. Frey is actually working undercover on a special mission from the prime minister to investigate the murder of a respected concert violinist at the rough hands of someone who seems to admire the work of Jack the Ripper. A fastidious fop, Frey is appalled by the gritty city and horrified by his superior, Adolphus McGray, a lusty Falstaffian character who calls his new colleague a "whiny lassie." The two actually work well together in this locked-room mystery. The real fun, though, is hearing the haughty Frey (who even brought along his fencing gear) recoil from the "dreadful" Scottish accents, the "disgusting" food and the "offensive stench" of the streets. JACK McMORROW GETS into some vicious fights in STRAW MAN (Islandport, $24.95), Gerry Boyle's new mystery in his rugged series set in the wilds of Maine. Take the bone-crunching brawl that Jack and his military-trained friends, Clair and Louis, get into when they run across four big guys with chain saws poaching hardwood trees on an old woman's land. The repercussions of that little scuffle not only complicate the onetime newspaper reporter's freelance assignment on private gun sales in Maine, but also endanger his family. The most hurtful fights, though, are those clenched-teeth exchanges with his wife, Roxanne, over an elementary-school project on pacifism that has her working closely w ith the soft-handed gentleman goat farmer who owns Heaven Sent Farm. ("Must be cashmere goats," Jack notes.) The difficulties facing peaceful people who must live in a violent world are revisited when Jack tries to write a story on a community of Old Order Mennonites. But, as Clair says when he hands Jack a Glock with an extra clip and two boxes of ammo: "I'm all for pacifism- But I'm not gonna die for it."

Five-year-old Jacob Gray is walking home with his mum, Jenna, when he is killed by a hit-and-run driver. While the Bristol police investigators want to catch the child killer, the case gets colder every month. Jenna flees to a new life in rural Wales, desperate to escape the scene that plays over and over in her mind. The detectives end up solving the case, but that's not the end for Jenna. Reading alternately, Steven Crossley (for the police) and Nicola Barber (Jenna) add to the listener's enjoyment. A tour de force with a shocking ending. -VERDICT Recommended for anyone interested in well-written, beautifully plotted suspense fiction (except those upset by depictions of violence against children). ["A wonderfully layered thriller that skillfully builds from that one tragic event": LJ 3/15/16 starred review of the Berkley hc.]-I. Pour-El, Des Moines Area Community Coll., Boone, IA © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.