3 Sultry, Summery New Thrillers

This month’s thrillers are full of women grappling with misdeeds — in some cases their own, but mostly those of men.

We start in Dublin, where Lou Manson, a college professor, is trying as hard as she can to forget the awful thing that happened more than 30 years ago. But when a figure from the past suddenly emerges, it all comes flooding back. “It only takes a second for the terror and guilt to find me,” she says.

Fiona McPhillips’s tense and unsettling WHEN WE WERE SILENT (Flatiron, 307 pp., $28.99), is about sexual predators and the wall of silence that often protects them, particularly in a place in thrall to the all-powerful Catholic Church. It’s also about how hard it can be for victims to find peace.

Alternating between the present and the past, when Lou was 18 years old and a wrong-side-of-the-tracks scholarship student at Highfield Manor, a snooty all-girls school in Dublin, the story presents a compelling portrait of a society animated more by what is concealed than what is disclosed. Back then, Lou’s efforts to expose the sexual abuses of the school’s P.E. teacher — while dealing with her alcoholic mother and her illicit passion for a girl in her class, Shauna — ended in tragedy.

Years later, a new allegation at Highfield, against a different teacher, stirs up painful memories. It also sends Lou on a hunt for her long-lost friend, whose life took its own sharp turn decades earlier and who has since mysteriously dropped out of sight. “Only Shauna ever knew the truth about that night,” Lou says. The book doesn’t come to a boil until the end, but the reality is even more shocking than we imagined.