LET'S MAKE A LIST of the dubious delights that await you in HONKY TONK SAMURAI (Mulholland, $26), the latest outing for Joe R. Lansdale's perpetual bad boys, Hap Collins and Leonard Pine. There's excessive violence (eye-gouging and such), to be sure, as well as raunchy language, sexist attitudes, tasteless humor, adolescent clowning around and general vulgarity. Not to mention characters named Weasel and Booger. Hap, who's proud to identify himself as a "very juvenile and pretty crass" rebel from East Texas, and his sidekick, Leonard, who's black, gay and tougher than rawhide, step into it with both feet when Leonard beats up a citizen on his own front lawn after seeing him abusing his dog. Then Lilly Buckner, a foul-mouthed old lady who recorded the dust-up on her tablet, blackmails them into looking for her granddaughter, who has disappeared from the dealership where she worked selling high-end used cars. It doesn't take long for Hap and Leonard to figure out that something hotter than vintage autos is being peddled from this showroom, but the nature of the merchandise and the extent of the criminal enterprise involved in its distribution will have the boys facing the Dixie Mafia. Lansdale's characters can be as down-to-earth as Hap's live-in girlfriend, Brett, who owns the private investigation agency where he and Leonard work. Others, like the transgender Frank, who acts as a front for the real owners of Frank's Unique Used Cars, are more loosely tethered to this green earth. And then there are the bad guys, from the bikers who ride with Apocalypse on Wheels to various locally grown sociopaths ("Some got three teeth and two are in their pocket"). Best of all are the women warriors like Vanilla Ride, who shows up for battle in "black leather pants so tight you could see the outline of a quarter in her pocket" and keeps a stash of sniper rifles in the back seat of her 1982 Buick. She's a pure computer-generated action figure auditioning for her own video game - and a ton of fun. WHEN YOU READ about sadists who have brutalized their housekeepers or au pairs, you try not to think about what life was like for those poor slaveys. But Minette Walters lets her imagination run free in THE CELLAR (Mysterious, $24) and emerges with an intimate and upsetting story about Ebuka and Yetunde Songoli, a rich immigrant couple from an unnamed West African nation who claimed 8-year-old Muna from an orphanage and took her to England. Confined to the cellar on a wretched mattress and allowed upstairs only to cook and clean, Muna is routinely raped by her master and beaten by her mistress (who insists on being called "Princess") until she's 14, when the younger of the Songolis' two sons fails to show up at school and a policewoman arrives at the house to question the family. Walters is no Ruth Rendell, but here she writes with the subtle cruelty and pitiless insights of that author's alter ego, Barbara Vine. There's no mercy in her depiction of the abusive Songolis, yet Muna enjoys a gratifying reversal of fortune when the visits of the police compel the couple to pass her off as their disabled daughter. And Walters has more sinister plans for this clever girl, who is soon able to declare: "I am what you and Princess have made me, Master," proving she has assimilated the lessons in evil she learned at their hands. TOWNS THAT FALL on the glide paths to airport runways are great locations for a book like WHERE IT HURTS (Putnam, $27), the first in a new series by Reed Farrel Coleman about Gus Murphy, a morose part-time house detective who drives a courtesy van between the Paragon Hotel ("paragon of nothing so much as proximity," according to Gus) and Long Island MacArthur Airport in Suffolk County. As an ex-cop, Gus was well acquainted with small-time crooks like Tommy D., who turns up at the hotel and gets nowhere when he begs him to investigate the murder of his son. Gus is too broken up about his own son's death to handle another father's grief, but when Tommy is also gunned down, guilt and "a sense of purpose beyond mourning" jolt him back to life. Although it's overplotted, Coleman's busy book - set far from the Hamptons in "those ugly patches we Long Islanders like to pretend don't exist"- has plenty of robust regional flavor. THE GOTHIC THRILLER is a treacherous genre, but Christobel Kent does a nice job balancing the requisite features of dreamy romance and eerie atmosphere in THE CROOKED HOUSE (Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26). When she was still in her teens, Esme survived a massacre that took the lives of her mother, twin sisters and older brother and left her father a brain-damaged wreck. You'd think that as a grown woman who now lives in London and calls herself Alison, she'd have the sense to stay far away from the scene of that atrocity. But her lover, an older academic who knows nothing of her past, sweet-talks her into going to a wedding back in Saltleigh, a bleak estuary town where "all roads led to the water" and the "fossilized stumps" of Saxon villages lie buried in the marshes. Although the father of the bride insists that "this is a perfectly normal village," Saltleigh's brooding atmosphere and history of violent tragedy make both the town and its unfortunate inhabitants seem hopelessly cursed.

Stolen from her home in Africa six years earlier, 14-year-old Muna lives as a slave to Ebuka, Yetunde, and their two boys. When she is not cleaning or tending to the family, she is hidden in the cellar, her one refuge. Daily beatings and berating by Yetunde leave her silent and wary. And even the cellar provides no real safety, for she is regularly raped by Ebuka. But when the younger boy goes missing, things change for Muna. Brought up from the cellar and into her own room, given new clothes, and disguised as the family's mentally deficient daughter, Muna relishes her new position as the police question her and the family. Weeks go by, but the boy's disappearance remains unsolved. Throughout the questioning, it becomes apparent that not only is Muna not mentally deficient but she is intelligent, has learned English, and is determined to create a life for herself by using those who have cruelly taken advantage of her. Not knowing whom to trust and unaware of the wider world, Muna works step by patient step, exacting revenge upon this family. One by one, family members begin to realize that Muna has more power than they thought possible. By the end, readers will be pondering: Are killers born, or are they created? VERDICT Offer to mature teens who can handle the dark side of the human condition.-Connie Williams, Petaluma High School, CA © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Walters's nightmarish Cinderella story focuses on 14-year-old Muna, who was "rescued" from an orphanage by wealthy Ebuka and Yetunde Songoli when she was eight and has been enslaved by the couple ever since, including being beaten by the wife and raped by the husband. For the last six years, since the horrific Songolis moved from Nigeria to England, Muna has been kept in the cellar of their London townhouse, a situation that improves when the couple's 10-year-old son goes missing. The arrival of a very observant policewoman forces them to present Muna as their mentally challenged daughter and move her to a real room. Most of the book's dialogue is spoken by the members of the Songoli household, and reader Eyre's Nigerian English seems authentic. She's equally effective at finding a cool, no- nonsense English voice for the policewoman. But the upper-class British accent with which she tells the novel's story is so clipped it almost qualifies as parody. This distances the listener from Muna's torturous situation and undercuts the book's suspense. It also slightly buffers the graphic descriptions of violence and sexual abuse, which some may find a relief. A Grove/Atlantic/Mysterious hardcover. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

This short work reads like a recipe for evil and may well induce a nightmare or two. The Songoli family's peace is shattered when their young son disappears, but this tragedy is a blessing for 14-year-old Muna. With Scotland Yard on the case and the media close by, the girl they stole from an orphanage, kept in the basement, and mercilessly abused is allowed a bedroom, clean clothes, and the status of "daughter." Yetunde no longer demands to be called "Princess" and pretends maternal affection during police interviews. Ebuka's sexual assaults and even son Olubayo's leering and threats have tapered off. Since the family members believe their own repeated statements about Muna's being illiterate and brain-damaged, they can't conceive of her as a threat. This portrait of an immigrant family living in a white world is densely layered. The attention of investigators is insulting and condescending at times, and it's easy to instinctively take the Songolis' side, only to remember they're monsters with a terrible secret. Walters (Innocent Victims, 2012, etc.) plays with that tension to great effect; each time a Songoli learns something new about what Muna is actually capable of it's a terrifying thrill...and it turns out she's quite capable. When she calmly tells Ebuka, "As your life gets worse, mine gets better" and repeatedly reminds the family that she's nothing more or less than what they've made her, this becomes less a taste of delicious revenge than a meditation on the consequences of abuse. Those brave enough to admit fault and apologize have some hope of forgiveness, but this is a defiant family for whom things more often end poorly and with true horror. That it's all related so calmly only increases the tension. Sly pacing and a detached narrative voice give this horror story exceptional punch. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

*Starred Review* Fourteen-year-old Muna was kidnapped from a Nigerian orphanage when she was eight, and trafficked to London as a slave for the wealthy Songoli family. Since then, she's endured the abuse and indignities too frequently chronicled in recent news stories, expected to be grateful for the shelter of her cellar prison and the sustenance of occasional food scraps. When Abiola, the Songoli's youngest son, disappears after leaving for school one day, Muna is released from the cellar to masquerade as the Songolis' developmentally delayed daughter while the police investigate. But Muna is not as defenseless as the Songolis believe, and she sees this turn of fortune as her chance to use her hidden mastery of English to outplay her captors. This is psychologically and physically brutal yet breathless reading; Walters challenges readers' concepts of justice and casts light on the abetting role of passive witnesses. Ruth Rendell's Simisola (1996) and Lene Kaaberbol's The Boy in the Suitcase (2011) also approach human trafficking from a psychological-thriller perspective with similarly phenomenal, if less visceral, results.--Tran, Christine Copyright 2015 Booklist