This remarkable expedition takes us miles away from the home base of the traditional village mystery and into the far-off land of the odyssey. For that seems to be what Peter has undertaken in his solitary travels from Quebec City to Toronto to Paris to Scotland and to a wild and remote stretch of the St. Lawrence River known as "the land God gave to Cain." That is, the heroic quest to reinvent himself as an artist and claim a new identity as "a brave man in a brave country." In another departure from genre convention, the murder that usually opens the narrative doesn't come until the end. But the execution of it is both creative and diabolical, a thematically satisfying finish for a story that sets out to probe the mysteries of the artistic process. While Penny has thoughtful things to say about the evolution of an artist's style, she's even more keen to examine the dark side of an artist's sensibility. As someone observes of the professional jealousy that corrupted Peter, "It's like drinking acid and expecting the other person to die." And what an artistic way that is to commit murder-suicide. IN THRILLER LAND, there ÍS something very dangerous and sexy about the teacher-pupil dynamic, especially where guns are involved. Jack Reacher, the massive hunk of a hero who travels light and flies solo in Lee Child's action-heavy novels, is burdened by a sidekick in PERSONAL (Deiacorte, $28). That doesn't stop this former Army M.P. from carrying out an assignment that takes him from Arkansas to London, where a crack sniper has fixed his sights on the world leaders at a planned G-8 conference. But Casey Nice, the green C.I.A. officer attached to this mission, is such an empty vessel you keep expecting an alien to pop out of her rib cage. Reacher is always up for a good fight, most entertainingly when he goes mano a mano with a seven-foot, 300-pound monster of a mobster named Little Joey. But it's Reacher the Teacher who wows here, instructing Casey Nice and us in the assets of the AK-47 and the properties of bulletproof glass, while passing on neat tricks like how to stroll through airport security, buy a gun when you're out of town and smash a guy's nose with your elbow. NO ONE COULD possibly have a more refined grasp of social status than the 16-year-old schoolgirls in Tana French's perceptive psychological suspense novel the SECRET PLACE (Viking, $27.95) - except, perhaps, the two Dublin police officers who turn up at their private school to reopen the investigation into the unsolved murder of a popular student at a nearby boys' academy. Antoinette Conway, the lead detective on the year-old case, comes fully armored with the underdog attitude of a tough kid from the slums. Stephen Moran, the sensitive young cop from a working-class background who narrates the procedural aspects of the story, arrives at St. Kilda's College with stars in his eyes. "It was beautiful," he says of the elegant mansion. "I love beautiful." He also appreciates the beauty of a friendship that enfolds four "enchanted girls" in a magical circle that protects them from the cruelties of a girls' boarding school. With her awesome facility at girl-speak, French constructs an idiom that is clever and crude and vulgar and vicious in one breath and deeply, profoundly tragic in the next. WILLIAM KENT KRUEGER, who draws his stories from Indian life and legend in the rugged north woods of Minnesota, writes with fresh passion and purpose in WINDIGO ISLAND (Atria, $24.99) about the local sex trade. When the body of a 14-year-old runaway from the Bad Bluff Chippewa reservation in Wisconsin washes up on an uninhabited island in Lake Superior, a frightened family begs good-guy Cork O'Connor to find the girl who ran away with her. Since most runaways head for Duluth, that's where Cork and the relatives go for a fast and brutal education in how the traffickers procure, groom, brainwash and turn the girls into prostitutes to service the men who sail into the huge harbor of "the Emerald City." Krueger has always written sympathetically about conditions on the reservations that make native children feel their lives are hopeless. Now he tells us that to human predators their lives are actually worthless.

How do you find Jack Reacher, the ultimate unencumbered man, who's always on the move to the next place? You put a personal ad in the Army Times, of course. No, Reacher's not a subscriber, but there's always an abandoned copy in a bus depot somewhere. So Reacher finds the ad, and, suddenly, our guy is tracking a sniper who may be planning to pick off a few heads of state at an upcoming G8 meeting in London. But not just any sniper. This is personal, too, as Reacher, back in his MP days, coerced this particular sniper into confessing to a murder. Now the sniper is out of the brig and looking to do some sniping, warming up on Reacher before moving on to the G8 turkey shoot. So it's off to London for Reacher and his minder, a pill-popping, twentysomething CIA analyst with little knowledge of the field. That changes quickly, as the unlikely pair (a rookie analyst and a retired military cop) skirmish with East End mobsters on the way to confronting the sniper. Child sets up a thriller premise better than anybody, expertly mixing gun talk, trivia, and tension and, when the time comes, detailing the bloodletting with the care of a connoisseur. This time, though, the dipsy-do of a plot twist is apparent at 100 yards, which hurts a little. But it's still Reacher cracking heads with gusto, which, for thriller devotees, makes up for almost anything. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Child is the alpha dog of thriller writers, each new book zooming to the top of best-seller lists with the velocity of a Reacher head butt.--Ott, Bill Copyright 2014 Booklist

Starred Review. In Child's 19th Jack Reacher novel (after Never Go Back), our loner protagonist is on a bus nearing Seattle when he picks up a copy of the Army Times newspaper that contains an ad asking him to contact Rick Schroeder, an old army connection. Paired with rookie Casey Nice from the Special Forces, Reacher is sent on a mission to find the sniper who tried to kill the French president with a rifle shot from three-quarters of a mile away. Their mission takes them to England with multiple suspects in mind. But Jack is watching someone with a personal grudge against him, an American marksman named John Kott. At the same time, being undercover avails them little government help. Casey's personal demons and Jack's memory of another young agent's death make this a taut and relentless suspense story. VERDICT Longtime fans won't be disappointed by this suspense-filled, riveting thriller. Those readers who haven't experienced this irresistible series should definitely start at the beginning and catch up to this book.-Susan Carr, Edwardsville P.L., IL (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

A sniper threatens the forthcoming G8 conference, to be held at a stately manor outside London, in Thriller Award-finalist Childs's clever, deceptively straightforward 19th Jack Reacher novel (after 2013's Never Go Back). Protected by a glass shield, the French president escapes unharmed when someone fires a shot at him while he's delivering an outdoor address in Paris. One of only four people in the world could have fired the 50-calibre bullet with such accuracy from a distance of 1,400 yards. One is John Kott, a former Special Forces soldier, who was recently released from prison, where Reacher helped put him 15 years earlier for killing an Army sergeant in a fight. Gen. Tom O'Day, of whom Reacher is wary, manages to recruit the peripatetic former M.P. to look into the matter. Reacher first visits Kott's empty house in rural Arkansas before traveling to Paris and finally to London, where he tangles with gangsters en route to trying to stop the sniper from striking again. Reacher's keen analytic mind in action will entertain readers as much as the assorted physical means he uses to take down the bad guys. Agent: Darley Anderson, Darley Anderson Literary. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Despite plenty of page-turning propulsion, this is one of the lesser novels in the series. Now that Jack Reacher has become a film franchise, it seems that heor maybe his author (Never Go Back, 2013, etc.)is spreading himself a little thin. The 19th novel featuring the former MP-turned-Zen do-gooderdubbed "Sherlock Homeless" by one of his old Army officersonce again starts with him drifting with nothing more than the clothes on his backno cellphone or bank account, no plans, no destination, no history that's apparent to anyone he encounters. Yet, through a stretch of plotting coincidence, he finds himself pulled into his military past and then thrust into an international conspiracy involving a sniperor are there more than one?and an assassination plot. He also inevitably finds himself paired with a possible romantic interest, the improbably named Casey Nice ("Nice by name, nice by nature"), about whom he muses, "Was there a finer place to be, than where those jeans were?" The plot quickly (in a Reacher novel, everything happens quickly) complicates itself like a chess match, as it turns out that only four snipers in the world have the capability of making the shot, each of a different nationality, each with his own country's authorities pursuing him. One of them is a man Reacher sent to prison 16 years earlier and who has, conveniently enough, just been released. After a close call in Paris, our hero and Ms. Nice travel to London, where a gathering of global leaders will provide a convenient target (whomever the target turns out to be). At one point, when his partner reminds Reacher that there's no death penalty in Britain, he replies, "There is now," with the sort of catchphrase bravado one might expect from Dirty Harry. Since Reacher has never been much of a team player or an organization man, the plot really shifts into high gear when he cuts himself loose and does what he does best. Every Reacher novel delivers a jolt to the nervous system, but this lacks some of the stylistic flair that truly distinguishes Child. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.