3 High-Octane Summer Thrillers

You’re not going to like Dr. Caroline Strange, the psychiatrist in Louisa Luna’s constantly surprising TELL ME WHO YOU ARE (MCD x FSG, 340 pp., $29), but you might admire her ingenuity and ruthless instinct for self-preservation. She needs both those qualities to deal with the chaos wrought by Nelson Schack, a new patient with two unwelcome pieces of news. “I think I’m going to kill someone,” he declares, “and I know who you really are.”

Further complicating matters are the plight of a missing woman named Ellen Garcia, who is slowly being starved to death by an unknown kidnapper, and the truth about Caroline’s unsavory past. The list of people who are hiding things, either subconsciously or on purpose, is extremely long.

“This is the first outright lie I tell them,” Caroline notes of her initial interrogation by the police, when she’s asked what she knows about Ellen.

It’s always interesting to grapple with the possibility that characters behaving in inexplicable ways might actually be suffering from dissociative identity disorder, formerly known as multiple personality disorder. Once she’s introduced this subplot, Luna does an excellent job of sending us down dead ends and switchbacks, as we try to figure out which characters are psychopathic criminals, and which are merely psychopaths (or not).

No matter how dodgy Caroline is — and we won’t know until the very end — she compels our interest in part because of how funny she is.