Review: 4 new mysteries include a box of doom, a Black Man in peril and an eerie sanatorium

These hot new mysteries range from touching to terrifying:

I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom, Jason Pargin.

The mysterious black box in Pargin’s novel is the size of “a footlocker.” Inside, it may contain something that triggers an American apocalypse, or, you know, it may just be a big old “nothingburger.” Either way, what’s inside is the mystery propelling this provocative, rambunctious, comedic cultural rant of a novel that’s fueled by internet paranoia, conspiracy theories and outlandish action scenes. Think Ernest Cline’s “Ready Player One”'s pacing with Carl Hiaasen-like social commentary on our digital age.

Here are the deets: Abbott Coburn, a twenty-something Lyft driver, reluctantly helps Ether, also twenty-something, get the black box to Washington, D.C. No peeking inside. No cellphones. A lot of cash. Abbott has spent most of his time online. He’s socially awkward and “can’t turn off his brain.” Ether, on the other hand, lives off the egrid. She’s determined, pragmatic and, despite what her name implies, far from soporific. A posse of eccentric characters (some misinformed, many deluded) chase them cross country, cheered on by a virtual torch-waving mob.

Guide Me Home, Attica Locke.

Against the backdrop of America’s “fascism under the guise of a return to better days, nostalgia as a slow, magnolia-scented death,” Locke’s remarkable ”Guide Me Home,” the final book in her moving Highway 59 trilogy, finds Darren Mathews no longer a Texas Ranger, a career choice that informed his identity as a Black Texan for most of his life. Years before, Mathews did “a wrong thing for a right reason.” The choice haunts him, eventually sending him into a nihilistic funk where “managing his sense of doom” is “nearly a full-time job.” When a young Black woman goes missing from an all-white sorority, no one is concerned except Darren’s estranged mother. The investigation forces Mathews to consider that the “men who had raised him, had deceived him his whole life.” This realization and a looming indictment make Mathews worry “his cynicism, home-brewed over the years of living in a culture of double-dealing and dishonesty, was clouding his judgment.”

Death at the Sanatorium, Ragnar Jónasson (translated by Victoria Cribb).

Helgi Reykdal, one of the characters in Jónasson’s delightfully fiendish “Death at the Sanatorium,” is a collector of Golden Age mysteries, novels like Patrick Quentin’s “A Puzzle for Fools” (set in a sanatorium) and Agatha Christie’s “The Murder of Roger Ackroyd” (Christie’s best, if you ask me). Set in Iceland, Jónasson’s slowly unfolding plot twists and his overly suspicious characters make for an engaging homage to those classics. The story opens in 1983 when Tinna, a new nurse at a sanatorium, finds the murdered body of the head nurse, then cuts back and forth to 2012, when Helgi is writing his dissertation on the 1983 murders. The novel is cleverly constructed around the perspective of the main characters from both time periods. But Tinna was my favorite. A delusional romantic, she enjoys “exaggerating her stories” because “life was easier if you tweaked the facts a little in your favor.”

The Night We Lost Him, Laura Dave.

“We’ve been looking at this from the wrong angle,” says Nora in Dave’s latest touching family drama. Dave’s trademark emotional twists and compelling characters, caught in the aftermath of loss, are in fine form in this latest mystery. It’s the story of the Noone family patriarch’s death and the unanswered questions it raises for his ex-wives, business partners and rivals, as well as his two sons and daughter Nora. Liam Noone was the founder of a boutique hotel empire, a company that appears to be at the center of his mysterious death. He appeared to everyone to be “smart, eager, solid,” a man who always showed his family “the best version of himself.” But what were the other versions? The reader is privy to revelations in a parallel narrative from Liam’s past, but Nora and her estranged stepbrother are on their own.

Carole E. Barrowman, author of “Hollow Earth” and other novels, reads and writes in Waconia.