Off the beaten track and close to home

UNDER FIRE

By Margaret McLean

Forge, 400 pp., $24.99

In Megan Abbott’s new standalone, “The End of Everything,’’ Evie Verver and Lizzie Hood are best friends - stuck in the prickly place between girlhood and womanhood - who share a cosmic bond particular to adolescent girls. One hot May afternoon, they’re on their way home from playing field hockey. Evie’s mother drives by to pick her up, and when Evie turns back to offer Lizzie a ride, Lizzie has vanished.

Soon Evie is in the spotlight, the only one who saw a maroon sedan that drove slowly up and back. Evie is the one with whom Lizzie shared her secrets, the last one to see Lizzie alive, and she relishes the power she discovers she has as police investigators listen to her. Best of all, Evie’s presence is embraced by Lizzie’s warm, garrulous dad whose attentions she’s always coveted. Meanwhile, Lizzie’s sister, glamorous and mercurial 17-year-old Dusty, who is tomboy Lizzie’s polar opposite, grows increasingly angry and distant.

The writing is anything but typical, as Abbott’s inventive use of language to build imagery reads more like poetry than prose. Here’s how her children at play taunt each other: “Voices pitchy, giddy, raving, we are all chanting that deathly chant that twists, knifelike, in the ear of the appointed victim.’’ The story veers from the beaten track as well, deftly skirting the familiar “adolescent girl as victim’’ scenario and exploring, instead, the power games that young women engage in with much older men - relatives and neighbors, some of them predators - games in which there are unwritten rules and exquisite danger for all who play.

With “Hell is Empty,’’ Craig Johnson delivers an action-packed Western thriller, rife with evocative setting and literary allusion. This seventh novel featuring wise-cracking Sheriff Walt Longmire creeps stealthily out of the corral with an increasingly tense setup. Longmire and his colleagues are ferrying three prisoners, all of them convicted killers, up Wyoming’s Bighorn Mountains to a remote spot where FBI operatives are waiting.

Though the prisoners are shackled, the atmosphere feels fraught with danger as they stop along the way for a meal. Between bites, one prisoner vows repeatedly to kill Longmire and all of his associates. But it’s quiet Raynaud Shade who worries Longmire. He’s the one who’s promised to reveal where he buried the body of a Crow Indian boy.