The Thread: Once Upon a Crime’s thriller picks

Let’s slip down the dark stairs and into the subterranean stacks of Minnesota’s Once Upon A Crime bookstore. There, you’ll discover an embarrassment of riches in mysteries and thrillers. If anyone should know which thrillers must be read right now, it’s the people who run the store.

I asked Devin Abraham, who manages the bookstore, to recommend three terrific reads hot off the shelves, and she came up with three fresh titles that are new to me.

Abraham finds the character of Beauregard “Bug” Montage from S.A. Cosby’s novel, “Blacktop Wasteland,” intriguing. He used to be one of the best getaway car drivers in the business but he’s been trying to go straight as a mechanic, even in the face of a pile of bills and cutthroat competition from a body shop across town.

When a former pal offers him a one-day heist with a big payoff, Montage is sorely tempted. 

NPR reviewer Gabino Iglesias loved the novel, writing that author Cosby “plucked every crucial racial topic” from this summer’s headlines and put them in “Blacktop Wasteland.” 

Once Upon a Crime is also recommending Jennifer Hillier’s “Little Secrets.” The setup is a child’s abduction and a deceptively happy marriage.  

A year after Sebastian goes missing and the trail has gone cold, Marin, his mother, hires a private eye and gets information she hadn’t bargained for. One of the twists? The point of view of the third person in that marriage, the other woman. And, she’s more sympathetic than you’d think.

Finally, Abraham says we shouldn’t miss Tracy Clark’s “What You Don’t See.”  

Chicago-cop-turned-PI Cass Raines takes a gig as a bodyguard for a magazine editor. When a violent fan attacks while they’re at a bookstore and wounds Raines’ partner, she teams up with a detective to track down the would-be killer.

Kirkus described the novel as so “gripping” that it “drags you in and spits you out … wan but satisfied.”

Our three Once Upon a Crime Thread thrillers:

• “Blacktop Wasteland” by S.A. Cosby

• “Little Secrets” by Jennifer Hillier

• “What You Don’t See” by Tracy Clark

For our thriller finale next week, we dive into three of fall’s most anticipated thrillers.