New York Times: Four High-Octane New Thrillers

Various characters (a glossy Manhattan socialite and the disaffected wife of a bro-y London businessman, for starters) go missing or turn up dead in THE EMPTY BED (Ballantine, 293 pp., $27), the second installment in Nina Sadowsky’s zippily paced “Burial Society” series. The separate strands of their stories intersect with and bounce off one another in often mysterious ways as the book travels to an array of safe houses, fancy hotel rooms and dodgy establishments on four different continents.

The connecting thread is a woman named Catherine, who has an undisclosed surname and an agency that provides high-end off-the-grid protection services to people who, for various urgent reasons, do not want to be found. She’s in Mexico City looking after some vulnerable clients. At the same time, as a favor to a powerful sometime lover famed for his business prowess and hard partying, she’s dispatched a pair of bickering yet deadly operatives to Hong Kong. Their mission: to find out what happened to a vacationing young woman named Eva Lombard, whose possibly sketchy husband says he went to bed in their hotel with an Ambien and woke up without a wife.

Why has Eva been drinking so much wine during the day, and who were those weird men who seemed to be following her? Who in this novel is actually good and who is secretly bad? Is Eva’s former boyfriend hotter than her current husband? Why was there such a high turnover rate among nannies employed by Betsy Elliott, the disappeared Park Avenue princess? All will be revealed in time.

The author is a longtime Hollywood screenwriter and producer, and at times the scenes dissolve so rapidly into each other that “The Empty Bed” can feel like a reverse-engineered action movie. But the quick cuts make the book the perfect solution to a widespread problem this time of year: seasonal short-attention-span syndrome.