A Merciful Fate by Kendra Elliot

FBI agent Mercy Kilpatrick has been through so much in the last year my head is starting to spin. Poor girl needs a break! While I understand the need for constant turmoil to make the series continue, her relatives and loved ones must all be fretting at this point and wondering when it's going to be their turn to get shot, raped, abducted or killed! All kidding aside, this is another great installment in the series. While I suppose you could read this as a standalone, there is so much history now with the characters that it makes more sense to start from the begging so you can understand everything that is going on. This time around, Mercy is investigating a thirty-year-old armored-car robbery after the body of one of the robbers turns up. Throw in a tabloid reporter who is nosing around the story, a creepy guy in prison a la Hannibal Lecter (minus the eating people part I guess), an abusive ex who's intent on making his wife pay, and a case of mistaken identity whereby one of Mercy's loved ones gets shot, and you have yourself another fine Eastern Oregon mystery.

An Anonymous Girl by Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen

The second offering from Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen is in the same vein as the first. There’s some mind-bending deception, a couple of twists here and there, and a satisfying conclusion. Jess, a twenty-something makeup artist, fakes her way into a morality study to make a little side-cash, only to have the study make more demands of her than she signed up for. The puppet-master, Dr. Lydia Shields, has an ax to grind and Jess becomes her blade. An Anonymous Girl lacks the “I never saw that coming” twist that was the highlight of The Wife Between Us (you can quickly guess where this storyline is going), but it’s an enjoyable ride there. My only beef is the tone that Dr. Shields was written in as she observes Jess (You fiddle with your hair, you hesitate before you answer this question, etc. [not verbatim]). It almost made me stop reading the book. But if you get past that hurdle the rest is worth it.

The Impossible Girl by Lydia Kang

The Impossible Girl is an exciting romp through the lives of a gang of grave robbers in New York in the mid-1800s. This era is the heyday for medical autopsies and advancement in understanding physiology, and the doctors of the time are searching for medical anomalies to dissect and display. Enter Cora Lee, who herself is an anomaly, suspected of having two hearts. By day she flits about the city and arranges to “procure” the specimens for various doctors once the owners of the bodies have passed away, and by night she’s “Jacob,” her twin brother who does the digging. Only now the people she has her eyes on are dying in unnatural ways, and there’s a high price for anyone who can find the girl with two hearts, dead or alive. The story gets a little grim at times, but it's a unique look into parts of our history that are rarely discussed or written about in a fictional way.