5 Edge-of-Your-Seat Novels

If certain novels just speak more clearly to baby boomers, it's often because of characters who have, shall we say, matured. Or the action unfolds in times that we all recall vividly -- even if, yikes, we're talking the '60s!

These five current works of fiction are generating especially strong buzz on the web and in the media.

1. Defending Jacob by William Landay. Assistant District Attorney Andy Barber is sailing happily into midlife with a 20-year career, a devoted wife and a 14-year-old son, Jacob. Then it goes haywire. Young Jacob is arrested for the stabbing death of a local bully, a case that complicates Barber's high-pressure prosecuting job and plunges the family into a tailspin. Patrick Anderson of The Washington Post notes that Landay's third novel is being compared to Scott Turow's Presumed Innocent, perhaps America's finest legal thriller. "The hype is justified," Anderson says in his review. "I don't think Landay's novel has quite the elegance or gravitas of Turow's, but it's an exceptionally serious, suspenseful, engrossing story that deserves and should achieve a large audience." Fellow authors agree. Nicholas Sparks praises Landay's "bold use of his genuine storytelling gift, his amazing ability to craft believable dialogue, and, above all, his extraordinary understanding of what it means to be a husband and father." Phillip Margolin says the book evokes To Kill a Mockingbird and Snow Falling on Cedars: "Defending Jacob, like these classics, separates itself from the pack because it is also a searing work of literary fiction."

2. 11/22/63 by Stephen King. Few events loom larger for any boomer than the end of Camelot: the day that John F. Kennedy was assassinated. King, who was 16, finally addresses the traumatic moment, nearly half a century later, by offering readers the character Jake Epping, a man with a wormhole to transport him through time. Epping travels to September, 1958, and has five years to thwart assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. The Washington Post's Jeff Greenfield says the hefty novel (800 pages!) is "richly layered with the pleasures we've come to expect" from King: "characters of good heart and wounded lives, whose adventures into the fantastic are made plausible" by King's skill at manufacturing realism. Los Angeles Times critic David L. Ulin is not so swayed, pointing out the inevitable difficulties of a time-travel story -- that "every action taken in the past has an effect on the future, which means even the best intentions often have unintended consequences." Fortunately for the novel's hero, the past "resets" every time he goes there. This allows Epping an almost unlimited number of do-overs, Ulin writes, and, because it doesn't matter so much if he blunders, "it also undermines the tension of the book."

3. The Mill River Recluse by Darcie Chan. The title character of Chan's feel-good novel is a disfigured widow with social anxiety disorder who spends nearly 60 years holed up in her marble mansion overlooking Mill River, Vt. The woman -- and the profound secret she keeps, which may change the town forever -- are the creation of a first-time, self-published author who became a literary phenomenon. Chan, a 37-year-old lawyer, has sold more than 400,000 novels in her second-act career, reaching No. 14 recently on the New York Times bestseller list. Erin Collazo Miller, writing for About.com's "Bestsellers" column, disagrees with those who hail Chan's prose as literary fiction and compares her instead to Nora Roberts, who "is extremely popular because she writes stories that appeal to people and are easy to read."

4. Hope: A Tragedy by Shalom Auslander. Speaking of recluses, this time the woman who's been shut away for 60 years, hiding in an attic, is none other than Anne Frank, she of the world-famous diary. Or at least she might be. That's Auslander vision: the poster child for Nazi barbarism suddenly resurfacing in middle age, obsessed with, of all things, her book sales. "Thirty-two million copies," she shouts to Solomon Kugel, the novel's main protagonist. Auslander, who debuted his brand of dark comedy with a 2005 short-story collection, Beware of God, is onto something with his twisted humor, but it never fully resonates in this latest work, says the Los Angeles Times' Ulin. The New York Times' Janet Maslin, who terms the novel "staggeringly nervy," disagrees, saying books about Anne Frank "don't get much funnier. Hope: A Tragedy succeeds shockingly well."

5. The Affair by Lee Child. Jack Reacher, a former United States Army MP who has starred in 16 of Child's novels, is aging gracefully in this new thriller, even if he's hopelessly stuck in the past. This swashbuckling fiftysomething dinosaur has no car, no home, and no credit cards, never mind a smartphone or a laptop. "The formula is simple and delightful," says Steve Drummond, writing for NPR.com. "Child drops Reacher into a small town, where he stumbles on some bad guys, and there's maybe a beautiful sheriff or lawyer or former military officer around for some romance, and pretty soon Reacher's racking up the body count." So it is in The Affair, where Reacher deals with a vicious rape and murder in a tiny Mississippi burg. Reviewer Rosie Mestel says it's embarrassing to admit enjoying Child's novels, since the hero commits more murders than he solves, but adds, "Reacher is the kind of guy you want in your corner when things get nasty."

SecondAct asks: What novels are you enjoying? Share your recent reads in the comments field below.