Thomas Perry, 2025
Sometimes you need to get away from it all. Like really get away. | 
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That’s when you want to find Jane. Jane can teach you how to disappear, and how to be someone else. She knows how to tell if someone – or your past – is looking for you. If the people who want to hurt you find you before you’ve turned into someone else, Jane can kill them. And just might.
But sometimes it gets complicated. Sometimes her network of contacts – who create the papers, who forge the records, who supply the money – gets overloaded. Sometimes her husband gets worried. And now there’s a baby. She’s haunted by a friend she failed, who meets her in her dreams, bringing half-finished wisdom from her Seneca ancestors. What is she missing? How can she keep everyone safe?
Trigger warning: physical violence
Genre discussion: Adrenaline is, by definition, exciting. Actions in these books usually have clear and immediate consequences, often dangerous ones. They’re fast-paced, absorbing, and hard to put down, and generally far divorced from most of our lives. From an evolutionary perspective, our lives are incredibly boring: we buy food (no daily excitement of hunting or foraging), we fend off very few dangerous animals, and we seldom have to exert ourselves more than is comfortable. I don’t know if we enjoy adrenaline books more than our ancestors would have done, but I do think that part of what makes them so compelling is how different they are from our collective quotidian experience.
I’m no different: I love the runaway-train feeling of “adrenaline” books, and can barrel through one within a day. And then I return to the safety of my daily life…until I find another well-written thriller.
