Friends like these A novel

In this busy psychological thriller from bestseller McCreight (A Good Marriage), Jonathan Cheung and three friends who attended Vassar College gather at Jonathan's Catskills getaway to stage an intervention for a fifth friend, New York City gallery owner Keith Lazard. Ten years earlier, the five classmates concealed their role in a tragedy at Vassar. Shortly thereafter, Keith's guilt-stricken girlfriend jumped off a bridge. Jonathan and the others hope to talk a still-spiraling Keith into rehab before he loses his gallery, but then Keith's star artist shows up, scotching their plan. Additional complications include menacing contractors owed money by Jonathan's fiancé, impatient mobsters to whom Keith is indebted, and anonymous threatening emails. Then the police find the crashed car of one of the classmates. The driver's seat is empty, and the dead passenger's injuries preclude easy identification. McCreight builds the suspense by shifting among a police detective's investigation and the perspectives of the five friends. Not all the myriad plot twists hold water, but sinuous storytelling, escalating stakes, and an avalanche of bad decisions propel the tale to a gratifying if far-fetched conclusion. B.A. Paris fans will be pleased. Agent: Dorian Karchmar, WME. (Sept.)

In When Justice Sleeps, Abrams takes a break from her considerable political responsibilities to craft a legal thriller featuring Avery Keene, who clerks for Supreme Court Justice Wynn and takes over the background investigation of a key case when he falls into a coma. In Hairpin Bridge, Adams's No Exit follow-up, Lena Nguyen doesn't believe that estranged twin sister Cambry committed suicide; otherwise, she likely wouldn't have called 911 16 times before her death (100,000-copy first printing). In Hummel's Lesson in Red, follow-up to the Reese's Book Club x Hello Sunshine pick Still Lives, Maggie Richter faces another artworld mystery. In Edgar-nominated, New York Times best-selling author McCreight's Friends Like These, a bachelor party in the Catskills is a cover for a staged intervention to help one of the guests, but someone ends up dead (75,000-copy first printing). Abducted from her found-religion parents' isolated Arkansas homestead and returned unharmed yet still treated as damaged, teenage Sarabeth gladly makes her exit, but in International Thriller Writer Award winner McHugh's What's Done in Darkness, she gets called back five years later to help with a copycat crime. Following Mangin's nationally best-selling Tangerine, Palace of the Drowned stars flailing British novelist Frankie Croy, who is staying in a friend's vacant Venice palazzo in 1966 while struggling to regain her early writing promise and doesn't quite trust a fan who comes her way (200,000-copy first printing). Having had a huge international best seller with The Silent Patient, Michaelides aims for another winner in his Untitled new work (one-million-copy first printing). Following the New York Times best-selling, Reese Witherspoon-optioned Something in the Water, Steadman returns with The Disappearing Act, about a British actress who realizes that she's the only witness to the disappearance of a woman she auditioned with during Hollywood's harried pilot season.